


Contravention in 3/8ths Time

by ghuune



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Addiction, Angst, Artist cas, Cas!whump, Dean!whump, Despair Event Horizon, Detox, Domestic Violence, Drug Use, End!verse, M/M, Miscarriage, PTSD, Porn With Plot, Redemption, Switch Cas, Switch Dean, after the end, chuck the diety, divergent canon, survivalism, the search for god, violent relationship
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-07-15
Updated: 2016-10-23
Packaged: 2018-07-24 05:49:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 11
Words: 30,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7496277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ghuune/pseuds/ghuune
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Contravention: An act in defiance of a law or a ruling. 3/8ths Time: Characteristic of a waltz. Two desperate men wage doomed war in a world they helped destroy. The world post-apocalypse offers no hope of redemption, so they'll have to find their own.</p><p>Some material/ideas appeared in a previous story, “Turns Into Earth,” but this is a fundamentally different take on End!Verse. (Ongoing and incomplete. Outlined to be 55K words).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. First Measure

FIRST MEASURE  
I. Prelude  
It passes the time.

Cas's grace is almost gone. Just enough remains to make him a little sturdier, a little faster, a little more dexterous, than a homegrown human. And what does he do with those last scraps?

He crafts tiny swans from the curls of paper left when they make dynamite.

Dean, up against the wall, arms and ankles crossed, asks, “Why bother?”

And Cas, not looking up from his work—tricky, tying threads to the swans without ruining them—perhaps the one thing his care can't ruin—replies, “What else is left that's beautiful just because?”

Dean stares at him.

Cas dangles his swans in the light from the window. Their shadows hover over Dean, vague as the memory of his wings.

“Besides,” he adds with a shrug, “I was stoned.”

II.  
Joe's in the stockade, awaiting judgment. Last night, Chuck stumbled into Cas's cabin to report the man had been caught gorging in the storeroom. Again. 

The two other times this happened, Cas explained—with the mind-numbing thoroughness that comes with a head full of weed—why they rationed food at Camp Chitaqua. Extra food for one means less for another. That other might be the soldier watching your back. You really want that soldier weak with hunger?

Scraggly gardens and scragglier livestock aside (it goes without saying, none of them are farmers) the food's limited to what they can scavenge from burned-out towns, shattered cities, every acre crawling with Crotes. Crotes eat like locusts (corpses or cans, it's all the same to them) and even if they didn't, little enough remains from the food riots. Of course Joe remembers those—they all do—but the memories of people clawing ribbons off each other for a can of beans only make him desperate. Some people drink. Some people do drugs. Joe binge-eats. He can't help it. So he steals, and he eats as much as three men, and Cas lectures, and none of it does any good. 

This is the last time. Cas passed Chuck's report on to Dean, knowing what it would mean. Dean gave orders, and his people collected Joe, sitting quietly in his tent. You see, he had nowhere else to go.

III.  
The morning mist off the swamp muffles the birds and the omnipresent insect chorus. Dean's troops gather in the large dirt clearing at the center of camp. The man himself stands on the porch of the stockade, Cas a little off to one side (like a good-luck charm Dean keeps in his pocket and fingers every once in awhile, rarely noticed, but always there), as the guards hustle Joe to the base of the steps and turn him so he faces everyone. The troops give space, leave him a little pocket of solitude and silence.

Dean's cold gaze sweeps the back of Joe's head and then up to acknowledge the watching troops.

“All right, people,” he hollers hoarsely. “Whether you like it or not, this is the Reich, and I am your Fuehrer. You go where I tell you. You fight when I tell you. I tell you to duck? You damn well better. 

“And you eat! What we give you! No more!”

He pushes Joe between the shoulder blades, but sturdy Joe doesn't stumble.

Pale faces, floating in the mist. Their eyes smolder above semi-circles of slate blue, their temples hollow, cheekbones like blades, collarbones like poles. Their rations aren't enough. Cas, who is fasting once again spare food for them, feels the clench and roll of their empty guts. 

Their hot eyes latch onto Joe's well-fed face. With loathing.

Cas hears—and knows better than to look for a cause, because this is just his tattered memory fucking with him again—a creaking: the sound of an electrical cable rubbing against a light pole.

He doesn't want to see this again. He has to see this again. Some human frailty he's fallen prey to, memories that snag him like unexpected thorns. 

Ride out the trip, he tells himself. It never lasts long.

The cable. The pole. Sunlight glittering, mockingly pure. At the end of the cable, a monument to human madness dangled, his gory toes describing lazy half-circles. A piece of cardboard, torn from a box, hung round his neck by a shoestring—muddy, frayed, offered from someone's battered sneaker maybe—and on that sign, drawn in dripping letters crusted black and brown, the word “GLUTTONY.” 

A single pristine fingerprint at the base of the “Y,” which belonged to a woman named Angela Forsotty. 

Richmond, that was, around the time his grace started getting dotty. Heaven's power didn't tell him anything else about Angela, except she'd certainly been misnamed, and she, at some point, had written a sin's name in blood. 

She's not here now, but Cas knows this only because he reviews Chuck's census. Otherwise, she could be right in front of him, blazing with vengeance, prepared to repeat her artistic performance. 

He suppresses a shudder. Dean's still talking.

“You disobey the rules? You stand in our way. This is the only! Safe place, the last! Safe place. And we all work to keep it that way... except you, Joe.” 

Dean has descended the steps to aim his words, like bullets, directly at Joe's face. 

“Because you can't control yourself. So you tell me. How the hell are we supposed to trust you?”

Cas remembers Joe whittling little dogs, tiny bears, teeny coiled snakes. They appeared like magic beneath his clever knife, born from knuckles of wood. Not a useful skill, not enough to earn more food: beauty for its own sake has no worth in Camp Chitaqua. 

Dean takes a half-step back. “Just so you understand,” he says as he cocks his pistol, “why you're dying.”

III.  
“What was I supposed to do?”

Cas doesn't stop lighting candles on the dresser. The rattle of the bead curtain as Dean shoves it aside is almost funny, that meek protest contrasted with the harshness of his voice. 

He tells himself to ignore Dean's tone. Answer like he doesn't give a fuck. The days of earnestly staring him down during one of his moral debacles are long gone.

So he replies casually, “Could've spared the gas to take him to town. I'd've drove.” Fire sears his finger as he lights the last candle, and that's good. He holds the lighter steady until the whiff of burning flesh threatens to give his game away. 

“Like that's any better? Crotes woulda had him for lunch.” 

“You're right. Your way was more merciful.”

For a given value of “mercy,” he adds silently, but Dean hears it anyway, the way he does, at the most inconvenient moments.

“You think I shoulda let him suck the meat off everyone else's ribs, that it?” 

The floorboards rebound as Dean strides across the cabin. Muffled whumps when he throws his jacket and shirts, aiming at a chair, missing. Cas, knowing what those sounds mean, turns to him.

Dean's skin slides over his muscles like water over stones. His ribs are visible, but they aren't stark like everyone else's. He rates extra food, same as the rest of the command staff, but he turns those extra rations down more often than not. Somehow he thrives on meals that render everyone else little more than sinew.

He closes until there's just a splinter of space between them, near enough for Cas to taste his breath. It's not sweet, but he savors it anyway. The taste of Dean hungry, Dean hungover, Dean's frank, salty sweat and the deep flavor behind his balls. Dean's blood is thicker than other people's, clots more easily, less plasma maybe, and Cas has tasted it, because of course he has. Everything of Dean's is his.

Cas's cock stiffens in an unwelcome rush. 

He sighs, resigned. Every time with this. Makes no difference. Doesn't help. To Dean, their fucking is no more or less significant than four fingers of liquor. It's more than that for Cas, of course, a fact he resents. Afterwards, he always needs a hit to mute the howling in his head: Lucifer's won, the world's dead, it's his fault, and though Dean loves him, he's not *in* love with him, and he never will be. Cas let Sam out. Dean can never, will never, forgive him. So yeah. Fuck everything. He gets high.

Every person in this godforsaken camp is addicted to something because of thoughts like these. 

Cas sums it up acidly: “Maybe we should all be merciful and put a bullet in our brains.”

Dean glares, slams a hand on the dresser, candle light jittering along the walls. It's too early for candles, Cas thinks; he's wasting them. But he wanted the flames to burn away Joe's teeny whittled animals, the snick of the lighter to cover the creak of the cable, and the pain of his burned finger to distract from his knowledge that, though it sickens him, Dean did right.

Or, at least, did right by the lights of this new world, which is his fault. His creation. 

One day, Cas knows, he'll goad Dean into killing him. When they've both devolved past all redemption, when they've both become hopeless monsters, Dean will be the last thing Cas ever sees.

He lives for that. For now, he presses himself against him, feels the hot shaft of his answering hard-on pressed against his stomach. Yeah, it's just fucking, but Dean fucking loves it, if he loves anything any more; like the liquor, it keeps him moving, step after weary step. 

Cas opens his mouth for Dean's bitter tongue.


	2. Second Measure

I.   
On a mission in Higginsville: stupid name for a town. The long-dead venerable Higgins responsible for it would probably blanch in terror if he saw the platoon that marched down his Main Street. 

Croatoan reached this burg a week after it hit Kansas City—carried by hapless civilians fleeing the mayhem, no doubt. Dean held off raiding until the first wave of anarchy crashed and broke, but it's ripe for it now. Everyone sane is either dead or fled. 

Dean's early MO was to zerg-rush an infected town and rescue anyone he could, but, surprisingly, he listened when Cas told him to stop. A town in the first grip of Croatoan-panic is even worse than Hell, if Dean's nightmares are any measure to go by. Cas doesn't remember his own dreams, but he holds Dean when he shakes and screams. For a little while. Until Dean wakes and shoves him off, bails out of the cabin with a curse. 

A distant cable creaks. Cas shakes the memory away.

Everyone's head is on a swivel, watching for Crotes, except Cas's. Someone sprayed the warning, “CROATS HERE,” on a wall with panicked haste. He appreciates the danger graffiti's gestural lines in passing as he scans the skyline, alert for the lavender glow that marks a building containing drugs.

“Cas! Eyes on the road,” Dean snaps. 

Cas ignores him. He doesn't know why his grace helps him destroy himself, but he's grateful, and Dean should be, too. The aura of liquor is cornflower blue, smaller and more localized: a bed beneath which a bottle is stashed, a single locker in a police station, a beaded purse mysteriously slumped on a bench. Since Dean's running low, he ought to turn Cas loose, use him as a bloodhound. But he doesn't.

There. Royal purple—good shit, lots of it—rippling like a borealis against the overcast sky, two doors down. They've been searching this neighborhood of brownstones townhouse by townhouse, checking cupboards and cabinets, stomping floors and banging walls, listening for the echo where a wily someone pried up a board to hide supplies. This used to be a tony zipcode before the virus, but now it's just like anywhere else—bodies, broken windows, burned-out shells—and just like anywhere else, it had its percentage of serious users with serious stashes.

Cas shakes two fingers at the front door of the house, directing his people to force entry.

“Cas?” Dean's question is half-warning. He knows why Cas is going in this house. Cas meets his eyes levelly. He can keep him out if he wants—Cas will obey—but more often than not, where there's drugs, there's booze. So what's it to you? he silently challenges Dean, who stands with one foot up on his stoop, gun still high—it'll take more than his junkie lieutenant chasing a hare to get him to lower his guard—but facing him. Expression grim, sere as always. 

Cas shoots him a sudden, crooked smile. “We need medicine, don't we?” 

Dean understands. “Yeah,” he snorts, giving it up, turning away. “Don't forget the Excedrin.”

Excedrin. Headache medicine. It's what he calls the shot he takes in the morning.

Kit, on point, goes in first. She's lithe, bends like a shadow, goes low right away and slides the wall, sweeping the room with the point of her automatic like a snake sensing heat. 

Crotes have the nasty ability to hibernate when the food runs out, looking like any other corpse until some sound or smell jerks them upright. But you can't just go plugging every still body you see: it's a waste of ammo, and the reports can trigger a panic if someone's feeling twitchy. So Kit is followed closely by Buster and Loess, the designated Choppers, both armed with machetes. They behead anything that still has a head, no matter how rotted or mangled. Buster, in particular, savors the job. 

Cas is glad someone does. The crack when machete cleaves bone is just more percussion for the orchestra that always plays for him when he's sober: tendons tearing and tires spinning out for the strings, screams and sobs for the woodwinds. None of this stops him from dissecting a charging Crote—he wants to die, sure, but if he spares the Crote, it'll go on to kill someone who isn't him and might object—but he doesn't *savor* it.

Yeah, he can stop thinking like this any time now. Time to look for the drugs.

He leaves his people tapping on the walls and banging on the floors and scurries up the stairs. His palm slips on the bannister (wet: is the roof leaking?) but no, it's just him, pathetic loser sweating with the anticipation of a hit. Jimmy Novak, lucky bastard, got sucked along with the angels when they fled. Cas doesn't have a high opinion of his brethren leaving Earth mired in this mess, but wherever Jimmy's soul is, whatever the angels are doing with it, it's got to be better than here.

Here is a bedroom. Rock band and Surrealist painter posters on the walls, black comforter on the bed, blackout curtains on the windows. Tribal signs of upperclass adolescent rebellion sprinkled all over: no, I WON'T be a stockbroker like YOU, Dad! Only this kid actually meant it. Croatoan probably spared him a long decline shuffling between half-hearted rehab and the ICU of the local hospital, provided he didn't get plugged in some drug-related shootout or nabbed by the Feds. 

Cas's suspicion is confirmed when he finds the stash: an opened and resealed ounce-bag of pale tan powder marked with a red trifoil (the trademark of a particular wholesaler who worked out of St Louis; Cas longs to find his warehouse, but no such luck yet); a bundle of gram bags filled with a paler version of the same (cut for dealing, Cas assumes); a wooden box with a stylized glass vial full of the uncut product, along with needles, stirrers, syringes, wads of cotton wool, a cooking spoon.

Just his goddamned luck all right. Heroin.

Cas sits back on his heels with a huff of disappointment. Not with the find: an ounce of mildly-stepped-on China White is an incredible windfall. Only it is Cas's policy, as the camp's head medic, to save the opiates for catastrophic injury. Someone breaks a leg, he doesn't want their pain on his conscience. He knows well enough how that feels, thanks to his broken foot last year. Then he used what heroin he had, and welcome. 

Good stuff. He misses it.

The sun casts no shadows thanks to the cloud cover, but Cas knows it's shining pure on the white peaks on the flip side of the meringue. He stands in the middle of that room, with its skin of Modern Hardcore covering its essentially wholesome bones, struggling with himself.

Oh fuck it. Fuck everything. He pockets the vial after making sure the stopper is well and truly jammed in. He has his own works, so he angrily shoves the wooden box back into the closet compartment it came from.

A thorough search of the rest of the room, including the kid's backpack, turns up the usual baggie of weed and a pill bottle with a mix of things inside. He spills it out on the comforter for a quick inventory. Speed, Ecstasy. A few pills he doesn't recognize, probably designer concoctions along the same lines. Seems this guy needed some help getting his ass in gear, and no wonder. Cas dry-swallows some speed and then pockets the bottle, where it clicks beside the vial. The heroin, he wraps in a shirt from the kid's dresser (a cartoon potato leering as it cups its hands between cartoon legs: “SPUDS!”) before he tucks it in his pack.

Before he leaves, he expands his grace, making sure he didn't miss anything. It hurts. His grace is so much thinner than it used to be and has holes in it, great gaping whistling ones letting abandonment and loneliness in. He doesn't remember his dreams, but he wakes up from them crying, filled with loss. Expanding his grace feels like that. It reminds him that he doesn't remember the time when he was safe, and cherished, and powerful, and loved.

That vial in his pocket is the closest he can come to that feeling now. Cas folds his grace back in on himself (small comfort that moth-eaten cloak is now) and raises a hand in mocking salute to the room's dead occupant.

II.  
Downstairs, the demolition crew has reduced the pantry to wall studs. Tucked between the posts are canned goods, blessed bars of soap, bottles of water purifier, spare filters, batteries, precious gas cans. 

No toilet paper though. Chuck will be displeased.

There's a blue glow in the kitchen that doesn't come from the fanciful homemade mobiles of stained glass hanging everywhere. Cas opens the stove and finds bottles of Grey Goose racked inside like wine. 

“Coming?” Kit looks back over her shoulder, one skinny eyebrow hoisted high.

“Yeah, gimme a minute.” Cas kneels and opens his pack. It's going to be a heavy load. Vodka's not really Dean's drink, but he'll take a couple of bottles. The rest will go to the troops.

A contented diesel engine chews its cud outside. Someone must have reported the stash in the pantry to Dean, and he's brought a truck around to take the load. 

Kit's gone when Cas glances up again. The glass bottles chime as he slides them in. 

Musical chimes. 

Wait. Wasn't there a windchime on the back porch?

Cas's animal instinct, not the strongest in the world, gives him only a split second's warning before the hand falls on his shoulder and he smells the high carrion stink of a Crote. As the Crote pulls him down, he twists, whipping Mason jars filled with decorative odds off the counter to shatter on the floor, his shoulder dipping away from what would have been an iron grip, his other hand fast on the hilt of his knife. The Crote seizes his throat, pinching off a shout.

It's a silent struggle except for the drumming of his heels on the dirty linoleum. Crotes breathe soft and quiet even at full sprint, and Cas can't breathe at all, his windpipe flat and burning. The Crote's strong nails cut into his neck and he thinks with sour humor, Most excellent. Open wounds. Exactly what what one wants when one grapples with a Crote, especially a Crote bleeding freely from knife cuts. Not caring, he twists his blade as he pulls it free. The best way to kill a Crote is to cut off its head, but if you can manage to disrupt its hydraulics enough, it'll go limp. *Then* you cut off its head.

But when you saw through a Crote's hoses, you release fountains of virulently hot Croatoan blood.

It saturates his clothes, sticky, stinking. The Crote's matted hair lashes the cupboards, leaving streaks of filth. Cas strains to hold her off so her streaming blood patters the linoleum, not him. It's now a race to see who goes limp first, because she's still choking him. Black spots swarm his vision.

Her flat, lizardy eyes blaze with fundamental needs: to feed, and to make. Cas doesn't know if Crotes fuck, and he'd want to blot out the knowledge any way he could if he did, but he knows they like to recruit, which they do by getting their blood inside you. He screws his eyes shut. His mouth doesn't want to close, scraping as it is for air, but he forces it.

Consciousness fades. He goes to the lake inside, its black water dotted with water lillies, fleshy petals like moonlit skin. Zoom out, and the lake becomes a starfield, infinite darkness speckled white, each spot a light on another of God's exhibits: sterile worlds of carven stone, gaseous worlds of color swirled, living worlds of energy weaving whole and beautiful cloth. This entire universe, a museum dedicated to a missing artist. 

Enochian is a language of metaphor. A water lily is a star; a star is a grain of sand. All is perfect. When Cas cries out for his father, he cries out for the Creator to behold His Creation, to redeem and justify it, to acknowledge and name it, to give it purpose. 

In Enochian, the name of Cas's missing Father is “Meaning,” but the void is meaningless. The stars, his tears, are just salt spilled on a table. 

The smell of salt. Cas, knowing he's crying, his lashes sticky with Crote blood, doesn't open his eyes. The air stuttering into his lungs tastes like copper.

Blows on his cheeks, snapping his head side to side. Flat, hard palm and no flinching back.

Someone shouts: “Dean, dude! He's breathing. Fuck.”

A small, wet, unimportant sound beside his ear, like someone chopping through a head of cabbage. “Crote's done,” Loess says.

“Sweep the back yard,” orders Dean.

“Kit's already on it,” the first man, Saint, says.

Cas imagines Kit slipping like a mongoose through the overgrown weeds, parting the heavy heads of wild grains with the point of her rifle, Buster tramping faithfully along behind her. He smells the wild onion crushed beneath his boots. 

“I don't give a fuck if God Himself is on it—go! Go!”

Footsteps. The swing and slam of the heavy back door. Dean mutters curses as he does something with water and a bucket: heavy thunk as he slams it down, water sloshing over, wetting Cas's pant leg, and then glug-glug-glug, the sharpness of vinegar. Vinegar won't save someone who's been exposed to Croatoan, but it sure as shit nukes the virus when it's out in the world. 

But this is pointless. Cas is covered in blood. He's sure none got into the cuts on his neck, but everyone has a booboo on their knee, a mosquito bite they scratched too enthusiastically. He's been exposed.

“Shoot me. Dean.”

“Shut the fuck up, Cas.”

Cas obliges. His voice frightened him. It wasn't just gravelly, it was the whole damned quarry. Speaking hurt. 

Various small, hard, irregular things dig into his back, his buttocks, and he shifts uncomfortably. Whatever was in those shattered Mason jars. 

Dean grumbles, “Some numb stunt you pulled. Staying behind for what? Friggin vodka?” A pause and a clink as he inspects a bottle. “Grey Goose? Huh. Mighta done the same.” 

Ripping as Dean cuts off his pants, undoes his belt. 

“Still. Broke the first rule.” Shirt history. More ripping. Hot, humid air on his belly. Cas grins, a little wry, as his blood leaps and Dean grunts, “Seriously? Priorities.” 

After a moment, he breathes, “Thank God for layers. It didn't get on your skin. Now hold still.”

A rough cloth passes over his face, gentle on his eyelids. The harsh scent of vinegar starts a flood of saliva in Cas's mouth, but his throat hurts too bad to swallow. He thinks of the heroin in the pocket of the pants Dean has cut and wonders if it's worth exposing himself to Croatoan to retrieve it. Or maybe suffocating to death when the drug slows his breathing, swollen as his airway is. Still, this really hurts. 

Dean's gloved thumb drags over his lips, leaving a cool film of vinegar behind. The wet cloth dabbing. Dean's fingers again, slipping inside, sharp vinegar on slippery smooth plastic nitrile. Cas's blood pounds in his belly, in his throat, pain and desire making an uneasy partnership.

“Dean, my pants pocket...”

He snorts. “Yeah, yeah, not gonna leave your shit behind, you big baby. Not when you damn near died getting me mine. Wasn't slapping you to bring you around, you know. That's not one-tenth the ass-beating you earned.” Wet fabric twiddles inside his ear. 

Cas's grace twitches and he sees Dean holding squirmy Sammy in a headlock inside some tiny motel bathroom as he cleans out those Dumbo ears, Sammy kicking and yelling, Dean with big-brother focus, mouth running off a reel of curses to save face while he does the job in front of him. 

The vision evaporates as Dean stuffs the memory down. 

“Jack!”

Jack barks acknowledgment in the distance. 

“Pants! Shirts! Socks!” 

Distant: “On it.” 

The engine still idles outside. The whole thing can't have taken above ten minutes. Time, Cas thinks, is bizarre in this new world: it fans open for the things you'd rather not experience, snaps shuts in those rare moments of peace. 

“You can open your eyes now, Cas,” Dean says. “How you feeling?”

Cas cracks one eye. The lashes part easily, cleanly. No blood. Since that experiment went so well, he goes ahead and opens both of them.

Dean crouches over him, face controlled as always, but green eyes wide, searching his anxiously. An expression that, in the old days, went with a mouth wobbling loose, tears jolting down. It feels like a violation, seeing Dean like this, even as his palms cradle Cas's jaw, taking the weight of his head, his thumbs stroking Cas's cheeks. 

Cas clears his throat and grinds out, “Feel like salad greens.” 

Dean laughs in relief and pulls him to his feet. The change in position causes something wet to slip down his throat—blood or lymph, something. He coughs. 

“Yeah, Jack, yeah, he's fine,” Dean says as Cas, doubled over, sprays pinkish spume onto the filthy lino. “Go get everybody loaded. Cas, here. Hurry up and dress. Daylight's dying.”

Cas, ignoring Dean and his armfull of clothing, stoops to pick up one of the decorative odds, once housed in Mason jars on the counter, now littering the floor. His thumb clears the thin sputum off it: an irregularly-shaped palm-sized pane of green glass, webbed for hanging in thin silvery wire.


	3. Third Measure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A change in Camp Chitaqua triggers a change in Cas and Dean's relationship.

THIRD MEASURE  
I.  
There aren't that many chemicals he can take to enhance the experience, and he doesn't want to take the ones that do. What Dean sees as a profligate waste of energies is, in fact, deadly serious business: it's another mile travelled in his search for God.

When he still had his wings, he flew the length and breadth of this universe, looking in on each of God's worlds in case he'd find his Father wandering some dust-struck plain beneath the lilac light of an alien sun. There's nowhere in this dimensional plane he has not searched, and God wasn't there.

But there are other planes, some in which God does not reign supreme, inhabited by beings so far beyond Him that Cas would be obliterated should he even draw close to contemplating one's big toe. If he tried to force physical entry to those places, he'd be dismantled past all reconstitution, smeared across the fabric of time and space—or whatever passes for time and space in those places. 

In between this world and those uber-worlds are planes sliced thin as glittering mica. Even humans can visit if they try hard enough. Certain rituals get you there, couched in terms of religion or culture or rites of passage. Cas has selected the easiest, the fastest—and, let's be honest, the most pleasurable—for his own journeys.

He snaps back into himself as the bead curtain complains of Dean's usual rough treatment.

“You done yet, Cas? Only there's other kinds of shooting you need to be practicing.”

II.  
Cas pulls a Henley over his head as he steps over a slumbrous woman. She stirs and reflexively cups his bare ankle. Cas always goes barefoot when the weather permits. 

Dean glances over the living carpet of sleeping women and lets out a low whistle. “Always wonder how you put in the work.”

“They do most of it,” Cas replies truthfully. “What is this, Dean? You know I don't give a damn if I can hit a soup can or not.”

“Just jealous, I guess,” Dean deadpans. “'Sides, gotta make sure you didn't get a cramp in your trigger finger. How's the throat?”

Cas rubs it. “Feels fine.”

“Looks like shit. Like, literally, green around the gills. Seriously, pick a better time for your cult leader routine.” 

The only problem with his “cult leader routine” is, it's a bit like throwing a gnat at a dartboard. The realm he reached this time is one he's already searched. He grimaces in silent frustration as he holds the bead curtain aside for Dean to pass through, an expression which only deepens as Dean barks to a woman hovering at the foot of the steps, “If you're here for the party, you're too late.”

Juliet has a close-cropped cap of curls, big caramel eyes, and the shy manner of a doe. All but useless under fire, she earns her keep at the Camp mending and making clothes. She's participated in Cas's rituals more than once, so Dean's suspicion is warranted, but when Cas sees her hurt expression, he palms Dean's shoulder and steps around to face her. 

“Did you need me?” he asks.

She stutters in place, half-swinging her shoulders to make a getaway, jittering back. “Um. No. You're right. I'm—late. Sorry.”

“Just tell me what you need,” he says. 

His irritation with his ritual's failure comes out in his voice, and Dean side-eyes him. Juliet bites her lip. 

“Can I make an appointment?”

Cas is the camp's head medic, thanks to his pharmacy and his knowledge of the human body. He doesn't have the equipment to do anything in-depth. Just symptomatic treatment and basic first aid. 

“Come see me after dinner,” he says, striving for kindness in his tone, and Juliet's face clears. She nods and bolts.

“You disappointed her,” Dean says behind him.

“Then she should tell better time,” Cas says, turning to him.

“You damn near bit her head off. A little disappointed yourself?”

Cas raises a wry brow. “Now you really do sound jealous.”

Dean snorts and clomps down the stairs. “You wish. Just as happy not to be buried at the bottom of the pile, thank you very much.” 

“Gotta keep all these women happy somehow. You seem to think it more efficient to work your way through one by one.”

Dean throws out his chest with a little of the old swagger. “I like to give my focused attention. Haven't had any complaints.”

“Sure, complain about the boss's performance. That'll go over big.”

Dean barks a laugh.

They round an outbuilding and the fallow field is there. Dean's already set cans up on the posts of the fence across the way. He hands Cas a pistol, which he checks automatically, but of course it's clean, loaded, and beautifully maintained, like all the weapons at Camp Chitaqua. Dean's using an old project Colt he's been trying to rehab; Cas heaves a sigh when he sees it. The hatefest between Dean and this particular revolver's been going on a long time now.

“Target practice!” Dean bellows. Distant sentries, invisible through trees and brush, holler acknowledgment. They'll avoid the section of the perimeter that includes the fence until Dean gives an all-clear.

Dean takes stance, sights, and fires. A can disappears with a metallic ping-wong. Cas sighs, shrugs, and does the same. Ping! A can drops.

“Saving the world, one Campbell's soup can at a time,” he says drily, breaking stance. “We're amazing.”

“Wanted to talk to you,” Dean says, sighting again. Crack! The can still stands on its post. He shakes his head and tilts the weapon, squinting down at it critically.

“Big surprise.” Cas fires. Ping-wong! “And another for me. You're behind.”

“Old bitch still pullin to the right.”

“Crybaby.”

“Fuck off,” Dean says without heat. He sights, fires, and another can dies.

“Nice. So what's on your mind?”

“Chuck.” Dean aims, but doesn't pull the trigger. He shakes his head again as he cups the barrel, glaring down at it.

“Don't bitch,” Cas says warningly. “We're not finding a new barrel for that make and you know it. So either roll it out again or throw it away finally and stop complaining.”

Dean's eyes flash up to meet his. “I wasn't complaining.”

“You had your complaining face on.”

Dean thins his lips and goes back into shooting stance. 

“So what about Chuck?” Cas asks, timing his question for right when Dean fires; he misses, of course, and lowers the gun to stare, disgusted, at Cas's shit-eating grin. 

“He's hiding something.”

“Chuck?” Now it's Cas's turn to miss, out of surprise. He lowers the pistol and turns to face Dean. “Why do you say that?”

“Reports ain't adding up. We got this one day, we don't got it the next. Asking me to keep an eye out for the damnedest stuff. Can't never find the guy when I want him, either. If he ain't selling us on to some other outfit, then he's losing his mind. I need you to suss out which it is.”

“He's losing his mind,” Cas says immediately. He sends another can to the great landfill in the sky. “For one thing, show me who's not. For another, who could he be selling to? Not that we're the only band of desperadoes hiding in the wilderness, Dean, but desperadoes? Don't exactly network.”

“Even the Merry Men had messenger doves.”

Cas shakes his head. “I'm sorry. I don't see that many merry men here...”

“Forget it, Cas.” But Dean smiles as though something Cas said amused him. “He could be diverting to some favorites in camp. Maybe someone's slippin' him a little something extra, I don't know. The point is, the man's acting like he's been compromised. You know I need to know.”

Cas can't argue that. If Dean was weird about trust in the old days, he's beyond weird about it now. And Cas is the one Chuck works with most closely, since Cas is the one who reviews the census and the stock inventories. 

Cas sighs. “I'll meet up with him later and see what I find out.” He sights. Fires. Misses. 

Dean grins up at him without ceasing his fiddling with the Colt and says, “Toldja fingerbangin' all those women would frig up your aim.” 

III.  
Since the day's sunny, Cas looks for Chuck in the community garden, but he's not there. 

If any crunchy types made it through the crisis, they stayed holed up in their mountain communes or private hermitages; at any rate, there aren't any in the camp. The volunteers weeding the acres are people too physically frail or too gentle to make good warriors. The fighters tend to pity them, but they have the most honorable occupation, in Cas's opinion. They might be tending nothing but dandelions now, but that will change.

Chuck uses an old building nearby as an office, so Cas, after waving to the workers, heads over there. Too large for a cabin, it looks as though it might have been an equipment shed. Though Cas wondered why Chuck commandeered such a drafty old barn for his headquarters, over time, he's filled the space with odds and ends. Chuck is a natural collector of just--crap. He could have been a dung beetle in a previous life.

Today, Cas notices Tupperware, long shallow drawers stacked along the walls for some damn reason. He peers through their milky plastic walls as he heads to Chuck's desk in the back. They seem stuffed with some blonde material, straw, bran? A gentle rustling comes from the containers, as though Chuck is raising mice inside. Another of his projects?

The man himself pores over a notebook, jotting down notations as he references a series of lists on his other hand. 

“Hey, Cas.” Chuck glances up at him with his usual smile, wide, but with an edge of anxiety. He slides some papers around, random, maybe a little guilty. “What's up?” 

Dean, all chock full of social skills, would spend the next fifteen minutes dicking around the point. Cas, one misfit speaking to another, just cuts to the chase.

“Dean thinks you're acting shifty—shiftier than usual, anyway—and it's making him paranoid. That rolled downhill to me, so now I'm paranoid. What gives, Chuck?”

Chuck folds his hands on his papers and beams vacantly up at him. “Just auditing the supplies, like I always do.”

“Well, I can see why he'd want to know what you're doing with fifty-five thousand Tupperware drawers, for one thing.”

Chuck rockets up from his chair, already talking, and over the next half an hour, Cas learns more than he ever wanted to know about the nutritional value of mealworms.

“It's the perfect protein,” he raves.

“Try convincing Dean of that,” Cas says.

“His stomach will convince him,” Chuck says with uncharacteristic hardness. He clamps the lid of the Tupperware container back on, thankfully concealing the wriggling ball of worms, and slips the drawer back into its rack. “He's gonna have to face it. We don't have a sustainable food source,” he says. “Just surviving's not enough, Cas; we gotta have a plan in mind for the future, when we grow.”

“What do you mean, grow?” Cas glances at him. 

“You seen Juliet? I sent her to you earlier.”

“I saw her,” Cas says carefully, because Chuck looks even squirrelier than usual and this is a sudden change in subject, even for him. “We didn't talk, though. She's coming for an exam tonight.”

“Oh.” Chuck rattles his fingers against the wall of the Tupperware, and the worms inside click as they scramble away. “Well. I guess she'd tell you then. Someone's gotta help her. Here's the thing, Cas: Juliet's pregnant.”

Cas gropes behind him on the off chance there's a chair there that he can sink into, because all the blood has left his head and his knees have forgotten their jobs. The side of his hand crashes into some boxes, but nada chairs, so he settles for a half-stagger to regain his balance.

“There hasn't been a pregnancy since Lucifer--” 

“Yeah. Since Lucifer rose,” Chuck says grimly. He spins sharply and grabs Cas's arm, preventing who-knows-what. Cas feels like he's going to faint any moment.

“It's—You think it's mine?” he asks.

Chuck looks lost. “Who the fuck cares if it is?” he asks. “That's just so not the point. A baby, Cas! New life!” He shakes Cas's arm for emphasis. “Finally!”

Dean's face flashes across Cas's mind. Okay, yeah, so, the first pregnancy since Evil rose to reign supreme. Hope for Earth, the triumph of Good, yep, yep. Doesn't change the fact that Dean will suffer—beat his ass bloody, sink into the ground without a trace, dive into a bottle and not resurface—if it's his. Because Cas wouldn't ignore his responsibility, junkie though he is, and Dean knows it.

“She'll need things if she's gonna carry it to term,” Chuck says, intense. “So I've been stocking up. Trying to do right. Because this baby—if she carries it, and it lives—I mean, that's humanity, living, making it, right? That means, fuck Lucifer, we win. Right?”

“Right,” Cas whispers, finally identifying the source of his distress. For so long, to live as though there's no future, that this clusterfuck he himself has personally visited upon the Earth's just some temporary situation until the last humans up and die: it was a comfort. And now it's gone. There's a future. Somehow, the world must be made tolerable for the children to come.

God damn it, double fuck. This is exactly the kind of responsibility he's spent his mortality avoiding.

And okay, fine, he's sunk down inside Juliet more than once, no thought given to condoms. Juliet's a friendly, giving soul, and he's just one of a number who might be on the hook for fatherhood, but still. Fuck him. There'll be no way of knowing until the kid is born, and even then, aren't most babies' eyes blue?

“Do we tell Dean?” Chuck asks.

“He'll find out soon enough.” Cas closes his eyes. As heavy as he's finding this, Dean will find it more so. Unlike Cas, Dean never accepted nihilism as an answer. He's always held out hope that Lucifer could be defeated, the broken world somehow patched. Juliet's expanding waistline will goad him to exhaustion as he tries to find an answer. 

Chuck decided to raise mealworms. Dean will launch suicide missions.

Chuck pats his arm kindly. “He's not going to take it well, is he?”

Cas can only groan.


	4. Fourth Measure

I.   
Dean slaps the bottle down so hard that whiskey jumps from the neck and runs over his knuckles. Ordinarily he'd do something about that, but not right now, because time has stopped while he stares at Cas, feeling as though his eyes popping out of his head.

“She's what?”

His voice sounds like it comes from the katydids singing outside.

It's after midnight. He should be asleep. Hell, they should all be asleep. The sentries yodel to reassure their friends, and to keep themselves awake, but now that Dean has heard Cas's news, he wants to bellow, wake everybody up, hand out beer and light the bonfire.

“We got a woman pregnant?”

Cas grins, and his ears burn. His words echo in that weird way words seem to have now. There's a division in the world: before Hearing the News, and After. Words have more hang time, After.

“You make it sound like you had a hand in it.” Cas's eyes go narrow and sharp.

Dean grins a grin he doesn't feel as he raises the bottle to his lips, holding eye contact. “Nah, never hit it. S'all you, Daddy.”

Cas dumps himself into the chair opposite Dean's little card table, and Dean passes him the bottle. 

“A baby,” he muses as Cas drinks. “Maybe God's back.”

Whiskey sloshes when Cas lowers the bottle and stares at him, his lips thinning. Dean's got good at reading him over the last few years as he got better at lying, so he knows Cas is not happy that God's the first place he went with this. But, hell, how else is he supposed to look at it? First kid in five years, with all the crazed humping that goes on around here? Has to be divine intervention. Which deserves a drink, so Dean reaches across the table and takes his bottle back. 

It deserves a drink, and so does the coiled darkness in the pit of his belly, the darkness that mutters jealously about Cas's semen uniting with Juliet's egg and making a baby. That's a tie Cas can't drink or snort away, a human connection—to someone who isn't Dean. He sucks down liquor, suppressing a cough at its harshness.

“We'll never really know.” Cas, still slumped in his chair, apparently relaxed, but eyes intense.

Dean lowers his chin, raises his eyebrows, asking a silent question, because Cas is not talking about God.

And Cas, who is every bit as good at reading him as he is at reading Cas, replies, “Even if the child comes out with black hair and blue eyes, that description fits every third man here. So relax. I'm not printing up mugs reading 'World's Best Dad.'”

Dean eyes him. This little speech makes him irrationally angry. “So you'd just leave her hanging?”

Cas's eyes snap with anger before his mask of careless indifference slides back into place. “She picks me, I'll step up. But why the hell would she when all I can offer the kid is a joint?”

That's fair, so Dean hands Cas the bottle. He blames the warmth along his skin on the alcohol, not Cas's long fingers wrapped around the bottle's neck. 

“Be pretty funny watching you try to put together a birthday cake.” 

Cas snorts. “And discipline?” He straightens, puts on his prissy angel face. “'Stop starting fires or I'll send you to Hell!'” 

Dean throws back his head laughing, and they pass the bottle back and forth awhile, letting this shift in their universe settle in. News, good or bad, always goes down better with a buzz, Dean finds. He doesn't know what kind this is yet, but despite Cas's gloom about God, he can't help but feel hope. It's a glow, separate and above the chemical warmth of whiskey. Hope, and responsibility: if the world is not fucked, they have work to do.

“You know this means we gotta settle Satan,” he slurs—drunk now. Cas reaches into his vest and pops a pill.

II.  
This party's low-key, as camp parties go: out of respect for the new mother, the troops keep the cursing down and the liquor soft. Juliet gazes longingly at the bottles of wine and beer as they pass, but she's surrounded by self-appointed handmaidens who police her like she's the Virgin Mary. She smiles at every well-wisher and conceals her yawns of boredom.

Dean keeps on the move, clapping shoulders, taking swigs or drags from whatever's offered. Though the troops greet him with shouts of “Leader!” and “Boss!” conversations stutter if he lingers too long. He understands. He's more useful to the cause as a legend than as a friend.

He only has a couple of real friends.

The bonfire grants Cas a new halo as he sits, staring into the flames. Even from a distance, Dean can make out the glassy glitter of his eyes. Cas popped a paper square beneath his tongue as they left his cabin earlier, but whatever he took, it's not helping him have fun. He waves aside joints. Women settle beside him on his log, bump shoulders with him, just to be ignored. 

“Let me guess. Any minute now, you're gonna swoop in and see what's got the angel in a study.”

Dean turns to see his sniper, Dahl, ex-Marine, pace up behind him. She presses a flask into his hand and he swigs from it as he turns back to gaze at Cas. 

“That man's tripping,” Dahl points out needlessly, “and not just in the good way.”

“It's on him what he takes,” Dean growls.

“That goes without saying,” she says evenly. “So why don't you let him get his brood on and go enjoy the party?”

He shrugs. “Guess I just don't want anybody sulking at this baby shower.”

“The first,” she says. “I'll have that, thank you. And here's to it being the last.” She raises her eyebrows and the flask in a salute. 

Dean side-eyes her. “Got any particular reason for this crazed baby hatred?”

“Can't keep the faith like I'd like, but the Gita says, a wise man laughs at a funeral and cries at a birth. Woman's baking a soul gonna be born into a hell of a fix.”

“Can't argue that.”

She gestures with the flask. “Could be that's what's got him out of sorts.”

Dean faces her. “You know, I never thought to ask...”

“Til now...”

“Til now. How can you be a Hindu, or whatever, when there's a guy you yourself acknowledge is an angel, sittin' right there?”

It's Dahl's turn to shrug. “Plenty of things could be angels. Gods, demigods, spirits, demons: my faith's got it covered. My question back atcha is, how can you believe in one all-powerful, all-benevolent God when you see what a mess His creation is in?”

“Fair enough,” Dean says, and sticks out a hand. She shakes it, grinning. 

“Look now, this channel's depressing even my happy ass. Let's go watch some badass stone-cold killers try and dance, c'mon.”

“I'll pass. And thanks for this.” Dean flourishes the flask, which he pickpocketed during their handshake.

Dahl rolls her eyes. “Fine. Split it with him—but don't you come at me tomorrow and say I didn't warn you.”

Dean sips from it as he strolls towards the fire. Cas doesn't break his soul-stare with the flames, even though Dean knows he knows his tread.

“She knows damn well I'm no angel,” he grumbles as Dean all but falls down onto the log. His boots leave shallow trenches in the hard-packed dirt. After that little display of agility, Dean reckons he better not mention the acid. 

Instead, he passes the flask. “So what, you don't have all your powers. Doesn't change what you are.”

Cas glares at him with slitted eyes. “Before—during all that drama with my grace, gaining it, losing it—I was always an angel, because I answered to Our Father, and I believed. But now?” Cas watches the fire chew a chunk of bark to bits. “I wish she'd stop.”

Dean grins. “So? She calls herself a Hindu, and she shoots people in the head. Pretty sure that goes against the code.”

“She's a Hare Krishna, Dean.”

“Whatever.”

“And a bad one,” he grouses.

“Is that why you're slumped over here? Because people are hypocrites?”

“We're all hypocrites.”

“God.” Dean exhales his frustration to the sky, sparks spiralling upwards on the heat currents. Sparks are never not going to remind him of the night he met Cas, striding into that barn as the messenger Castiel: cold, untouchable, totally immune. Well, he sureshit fixed that, just like he fixed the world and everything else. Dean's a corruption for which there is no cure. So this mood of Cas's is really on him.

And since this fact pisses him off, he snarls, “You need to take a page out of her playbook, or hell, even your own, and accept what can't be changed. And find the strength to change what can! Juliet's baby is a fact, and the world is fucked—that's a fact too. You, me, we're the guys who broke it, and we're the guys who're gonna fix it.”

The firelight in Cas's eyes turn them violet and orange as he glances sideways at him. “That trick doesn't work without your brother.”

Dangerous ground. They both flinch. 

They do not talk about Sam. 

Dean came clean with his original crew of five, the ones with him when he broke the chains on Camp Chitaqua. Since none of them were sworn to secrecy, everyone who came after knows how he and Sam were the archangels' chosen vessels, and how Dean said No, but Sam said Yes. Juliet's kid and the ones to follow will think the story of How Lucifer Rose nothing more than boring old history, but he and Cas—

Well. They just don't fucking talk about it. Because yeah, Cas blames himself for letting Sam out of the panic room, but Dean was the neglectful sonuvabitch who put his brother in the slammer to start with. 

There's some conversations too fatal to have.

He digs his nails into his palm and thrusts the flask at Cas. 

Cas takes it, throws his head back to suck from it, firelight licking his throat as he swallows. He can reject the name of angel all he wants; doesn't change the fact that grace still subtly glows on his skin and he still smells—at least a little—like flowers. Cas lowers the flask, meets his eyes. Grimaces. Hands him the flask, rattling empty.

“You won't fix this by fucking me,” he says, and turns his face away.


	5. Fifth Measure

I.  
Cas goes on a painting kick, starts murals on every wall in Camp Chitaqua. 

Ever since the baby shower, it's been eating at him: Camp Chitaqua's babies will grow up thinking the swamp, the insects zipping gold and silver, the splintery wood of the weathered buildings, are the whole world. They'll never see a red panda, or a chameleon. They'll never part the fronds to find an elephant yanking down leaves. 

So what the hell. He didn't have a gift for Juliet. This will have to do.

The troops are down and dip their whole fists in the open paint buckets to doodle like cavemen, all smeary handprints and primitive outlines. Cas laughs to see their hair spiked with dried paint, their faces slashed red and blue like ancient Celts. A definite party atmosphere develops as they snatch each other into heated kisses, shotgunning smoke from the circulating pipe. Though Cas catches a whiff of the communal haze, he's more focused on painting than getting high or playing grab-ass, for a change. 

Dean wanders into the scene and leans against a white-prepped wall, printing the wet paint with the creases of his khaki coat and cargo pants. He doesn't seem to mind, even though Cas, out of concern for the exact same thing, ditched his clothes a long time ago. 

Cas straightens up from detailing a unicorn's cleft hoof and calls out, “Fearless Leader! Grab a brush!”

Dean just frowns and crosses his arms, his feet at the ankles, really making sure that wall gets the full inprint of his muscular back. Cas makes a note to himself to stencil it in green and yellow, add some branching stems and flowers. Since Dean hasn't pressed his head against the wall—out of concern for his hair, of course—he'll have a tree growing from his neck, trunk and roots spreading out below. It'll look friendly. And piss him off something royal.

Dean continues to glower, his eyes travelling down Cas's body as he returns to his unicorn. Cas stretches, bends, makes a display of himself. Dean's been cool towards him since the bonfire, not that Cas blames him; he regrets what he said, though not enough to apologize. Seems like part of Dean—eight inches long—wants to forget it, too, though not enough to come over and stop playing Chief Thundercloud. So here they are. Again. 

“Ding-ding-ding. Round five hundred of your fucked-up thing,” James says under his breath. He holds a number up so Cas can hit it without putting down his brush. A dragonfly whirs overhead. His grace stutters, as it sometimes does, and strobes the insect's flight. With each discrete frame of the insect's beating wings, in bursts, he feels James's weary concern, the brittle joy of the playful soldiers, and Dean—lustful, regretful, angry, worried, tender—as in raw. 

He exhales smoke as the extra-sensory perception flattens out. His grace must want him to patch it up; he wouldn't have sensed Dean's pain otherwise. And who is he to go against his grace? Dying as it is, it deserves some sickbed consideration.

So he slings his brush into the pan, spattering the wall magenta, and goes to him.

“What is it now?” he asks, spreading his stained palms wide. “Laughter giving you a headache? People smiling making you queasy?”

“We got a mission tonight,” he replies. “Cas, I can't use 'em if they're wore out.”

Cas blows out, regretting his sharpness, regretting also that rogue impulse of Dean's to attribute every emotion he has or will ever have on his commitment to the cause. Regretting, too, that he's naked as he looks at Dean with his back to the wall, taut abs visible through the thin jersey t-shirt, long thighs hard in jeans. 

But why regret it? They want each other. Through every miscommunication, it always thrums true: they're glued to each other through the skin.

So Cas steps into his space and tips his head, Dean's eyes going wide with that familiar near-alarm, crossing slightly to keep him in focus. Why does he always look at him as though he's got some awesome power? These days he's nothing but a burnout, but that startled, vulnerable look in Dean's eyes never changes. 

Dean licks his lips. “Cas--” he stammers. 

“Something scare you?” Cas runs his hand down Dean's stomach, smearing paint. Dean's zipper-armored shaft, hot and hard against his palm. Dean grabs his wrist to stop him. “Afraid you'll let go? Start having fun?”

“Maybe,” Dean murmurs, watching Cas's mouth, tipping his head, their breath mingling. “Maybe afraid I die in six hours because I'm too loose to fight.”

“So cancel the mission,” Cas says. His lips flutter against Dean's and Dean shifts, brackets him with his thighs. “City's not going anywhere.”

“And then cancel the next, and the next,” Dean rumbles into his ear, his low voice so thick Cas can barely make out the words. “Stay inside you the rest of my life, til we all starve.”

“Never happen. Chuck's got mealworms,” Cas whispers, and Dean thumps his head against the wall, getting paint in his hair after all, bellowing laughter. 

The troops slap shoulders, point, move off and give them space. Round five hundred of this fucked-up thing, all right, and they all know the drill. They follow the ups and downs of Cas and Dean like it's the weather report.

“All right, princess, your modesty's protected,” he says against Dean's mouth, and then drives in, pins him to the wall, his palm skidding on wet paint and leaving prints that maybe he won't stencil in after all. Be a hell of a thing to explain to the toddlers: Here's the mural of Cas the Former Angel seducing your Fearless Leader. 

Dean breaks free, panting. “Why do you always have to be--” he begins, before Cas is there again, taking the words into his mouth along with Dean's tongue. 

“What?” Cas asks when they break for air. “Have to be what?” 

Dean goes wall-eyed with terror, boxed into making what might actually be an emotional revelation, and Cas, taking pity on him, shines his cock again so his answer is lost in a groan. 

II.  
Cas slings his pack onto the flatbed of the truck before he strolls around to the passenger's side of the cab and climbs in. Every vehicle has its floods on, cold white and stark, and Cas's eyes flash electric blue as he glances at Dean. A suck-mark glows red and purple on the side of his long throat, a reminder of just how mortal he's become.

Every mission, Dean watches Cas, reassured by the way grace still limns his skin or the easy flexibility of his movements, only to be depressed by a suck-mark or a splash of red in his eyes. He checks his pistols again and tightens the straps on his knives, nervous tics to conceal his real concern: Cas, shagged-out and careless, might not return. Dean's always been mortal, and he likes to think he's got the hang of the whole not-dying thing, but Cas? Has a tendency to fling himself at a situation like a suicide off a bridge. 

He yanks himself in behind the wheel. “You good?” he asks, because he can't help himself.

“No, actually,” Cas drawls, pretending to study the map, “I decided to take a handful of Valium just for shits and giggles and I've totally lost my edge. Think I'll stay in the rig and nap through this one.”

Dean grunts and slams the door. He himself is looser than he'd like. A thermos of coffee and a couple of caffeine pills have pared his nerves, but he still feels buttery, post-orgasmic. His collarbone stings where Cas nipped him. Cas stares at the bruise and bites his lip.

He touches Cas's neck where the suck-mark shines, prickly stubble contrasting downy skin. Engines roar and darkness falls as the troops shut down the floods, but it all seems far away. And damn it. This is exactly the wrong way to go out on a mission. All he wants is to drag Cas against him and let the world spin awhile, without any thoughts of murder or salvation.

Cas suddenly grins, teeth white and sharp as a fox's. He nips the flesh beneath Dean's thumb, lapping, his eyes closing. 

“Let's just get through this,” Dean grits out, gently withdrawing his hand, turning the key in the ignition. His pants don't fit right and he marvels. Refractory period? Whatever bright bulb came up with that concept never encountered Cas. 

Cas sighs as Dean wrestles the Chevy out of the muddy drive. He rattles the map. “So what are we after this time?” he asks, business-like.

“Stuff,” Dean says.

“Specific,” Cas says. “As a matter of fact, there's a 'stuff' depot three blocks east of Mantlewood. Should we go there first?”

“Stuff for Juliet,” Dean clarifies. He clears his throat and shifts. The asphalt unspools beneath his tires, and he follows the red brake lights of the Jeep ahead. “A cradle. Bottles. Stuff. There's a list, I think Nina's got it.”

“Dean, what she needs is an OB-GYN and a pediatrician. Formula in case her milk fails, and antibiotics for after the birth. That's if she doesn't die during it, which is by no means a given.” Cas rolls his eyes to look at him, notes his clenched jaw, and sighs. “It just... frightens me, how high everyone's getting.”

“So the fact that there's hope all the sudden? Scares the hell out of you.”

“Yeah, that scares me,” Cas says, his eyes back on the map. 

“Welcome to life, you big baby,” Dean snaps. “You think I'm not scared? But forgive me, pardon me! if I wanna act like it's gonna be all right.”

Cas bites the inside of his cheek. Slowly, he says, “But will you stand it if it's not?”

Dean slaps the steering wheel. “You let me worry about me.” Then he exhales, because what Cas means is, he's worried about him, and given Dean's track record with crushing disappointments, he can't blame the guy. So he repeats, more gently, “You let me worry.”

“Can't see any way to stop you,” Cas says with some asperity. He rattles the map again, and this time it's not just a show. “So if you want to find some useful 'stuff' for Juliet, here's what I suggest--”

III.  
There's never really a good time of day for a mission, but for areas still occupied by civilians, Dean goes at night. Sane people batten down and wait out the dark, so anything moving is probably an enemy. He's picked a civilian town this time, because finding some prepper's stash won't do them any good. What they need is a hospital with a maternity ward, or, failing that, one of those big-box stores that has everything but two of every animal.

It's a trip, cruising down Civvie Street, with newspapers stocked in bins and street lights still working. The town's called Cody, and the people here are doing as people do, eating breakfast and going to work like the world hasn't been yanked out from under them like a big rug. It's all denial. Signs of the end are everywhere, from the dire headlines on the newspapers to the hastily-nailed two-by-fours on the townhouses. 

According to Cas, the local hospital's been closed since it was bombed last year. Nothing's been done with it since then; the street still has sawhorse barricades set across it. Dean blows past them with two wheels up on the curb, leaving less impetuous people to actually stop their vehicles and remove them. 

Cas ditches out in a rush when Dean cuts the engine, saying over his shoulder, “Won't be long before the police get here, if they're still protecting and serving, that is.”

Dean cocks a pistol and slams the door. “And if they ain't, you can bet this place is colonized with the best humanity has to offer.” 

“Beds, blankets, hot and cold running drugs? I believe it,” Cas says. He snaps orders at the troops as they leave their rigs, stationing pairs at exits to secure their escape and assigning the rest to sweeps. Dean eyes him critically; his movements are a little too crisp and frantic, and he's pretty sure he's popped a pick-me-up. 

Just once he'd like to take the man out without worrying about the chemicals burning in his blood. 

Too late now, and he should probably just relax and leave the care and feeding of Cas's nerves to Cas. He ducks into the hospital through one of the shattered windows, mindful of the glass snarling in the frame. Cas backs in after him, continuing to sign to the troops in modified military handcant.

Get admitted to about five or six separate hospitals, you start to grasp the logic of the floor plans, so Dean kind of knows where he's going. It's like walking through a triple-exposed photograph. Part of him expects to turn a corner, open a door, and find Sam on a hospital bed, bruised green but healing, stitches all along his seams. He swallows and tries to find his footing in the Now. Now he's in a bombed-out hospital that's probably chock full of zombies, either Crote-flavored or extra-junkie. Beneath chemical accelerant and char, bleach and sickness, a hint of blood and shit. Eau de hospital. Damn near smells like home.

The only sounds are their boots on the linoleum, slightly tacky with who knows what, and their dry, rapid breathing. Cas swings back and forth behind him. Dean, on point, clears each room as they pass. 

“Your grace giving you anything?” 

“Nada,” Cas says. “No drugs, no nothing.”

“You don't think that's weird?”

Cas's clothing rustles as he shrugs. “Could be I'm just getting weaker. What we need is the central pharmacy.”

Dean grins. “No problem. We'll just follow the signs.”

Even if there were still signs on the walls, there's no light to read them by. They're walking by the thin beams shed by their penlights. 

Cas says, “Central pharmacy should be on the second or third floor, middle of the building.”

“Looks like we're taking the stairs.”

“Lovely deathtrap stairs.”

“Where lurking baddies can pop us at their leisure.”

“Junkies are my people and I am their King,” Cas says. “Maybe I can reason with them.”

“Yeah, right,” Dean snorts. “Call that Plan B.”

They carry on, pistols drawn.

IV.  
They skirt the crispy shell of what was once the Emergency Department. Water drips and echoes, and the broken building settles with creaks like groans of pain. Dean twitches at every new sound, and Cas holds his breath to listen.

Cas mutters, “This about creepy enough for you?” 

“This is always the part where something jumps out and grabs me,” Dean admits. “Stairs.”

Cas puts his back to the wall while Dean kicks open the door and goes in low. He swings around the doorframe, catching the heavy door on the rebound and using it for cover. They stay still, waiting to see if their dramatic entrance drew any attention. 

“I hear bats,” Cas says after a few minutes.

“Just bats?”

“I said bats.”

Dean shakes his head. “Ever notice how it's so much worse when nothing happens?”

They mount the stairs, Cas once again walking backwards to cover the rear, Dean half-crouched with the Sig pointed almost straight up. They kill their lights, as the small windows let in some weak illumination. 

“It's the slowness that gets me,” Cas bitches. “Like, did I want to spend a decade of my limited, mortal life inching up a stairwell? No.”

“Shut up, Cas.”

They both sigh in relief when they reach the second floor. Dean shoots Cas a questioning look and breaks into a smile when Cas nods and points. The sooner they find the pharmacy and stock up on antibiotics and painkillers, sutures and antiseptics, the sooner they can get the hell out of here.

But on their way there, Cas hits the brakes for no good goddamned reason, bringing Dean up short with a hand fisted in his jacket. “Look,” he whispers, and directs the beam of his penlight to the wall. A cheerful flier for a bake sale to benefit something or other. “MATERNITY WARD, PUBLIC ENTRY FOURTH FLOOR,” it says. 

“Bottles and diapers and formula,” he hisses.

“Supermarkets, Cas,” Dean hisses back.

“All stripped! If we don't grab it here while we have the chance, we won't get another one.”

Cas stares at him until Dean exhales and rolls his eyes. 

“Hope our luck holds,” he grouses.

The pharmacy's long since been sacked, but the only drugs missing are the opiates and the sedative-hypnotics. Cas makes a disappointed farting noise when he sees the Ativan's all gone. Dean swings the sledge to get into the stocks of antibiotics, enjoying the weight of the hammer in his hands and the sharp crackle of plastic shattering. Cas grins at his childish pleasure, and he grins back, panting. Wrecking shit is always fun.

Then it's back to the stairwell to head up to the fourth floor.

They move faster this time, Cas still hearing nothing but high-pitched bat calls. Dean keeps his Sig cocked but holds it by his hip as he mounts the stairs like a regular person. “Whoever's living here doesn't seem to be in the mood to rumble,” he says when Cas cocks an eyebrow at him. “We made enough noise trashing that pharmacy to raise the dead.”

“The word 'jinx' mean anything to you, Dean?”

Dean and Cas flank the exit to the fourth floor and take turns pressing their ears against the door. Dean raises his eyebrows at Cas, who shakes his head. But the angel looks worried. Way back in the day, that would have given Dean pause, but Cas Version 2.0 has turned pessimism into a personal philosophy. This Cas is just spun that nothing's happened yet. So Dean throws open the door.

V.  
It's a good thing Cas decided to hang back, because it puts him in the best possible position to catch Dean when he's thrown back through the doorway, arresting his momentum before he topples down the stairs. Cas shoves Dean to the wall and surges forward, the weak light through the tiny windows glinting orange off his blades.

Dean shakes the stars out of his eyes and shoves himself upright, listening to the grunts and blows and the pattering fall of blood, copper-sharp. There's a mass of bodies through the door and he can't make out who does what, but it looks to be a three-on-one where Cas is the one, and he doesn't like those numbers.

The Sig's worse than useless. He holsters it, grabs his knives, and wades in.

“No, Dean!”

His arms are restrained behind his back, and he pitches and yaws, trying throw him off. “Cas,what the hell?” he manages to get out, in between grunts as the three assailants take this marvellous opportunity to wail on him some. The blows hurt, but they aren't pile-drivers. There's no muscle there, just a lot of pointy bones. Some underfed jackoffs, fine, great-- “Cas, let me go!”

“They're no threat!”

“The hell they aren't, they cut you--”

Cas's blood is all over his shirt, that floral tang of grace overriding the metallic copper, and it makes him blind. He swings his shoulders and Cas hits the wall with a thump and a groan, and while he recovers, Dean lays waste.

The next time the angel lands on his back, Dean doesn't fight him. The three boys who attacked them—and they are, really, just boys, teenagers—are on the ground, knocked out. Cas restrains him anyway, because Dean's about to go for the kill, and he knows it.

“You done?” he asks, shaking him a little.

“No,” Dean says. Flowers, flowers and blood. 

“You're done,” Cas says, more definitely, and turns him loose, eyeing him, panting. Eyes still cobalt blue, even in the salty orange light through the tiny, dirty window.

Dean glances down at Cas's arm, still dripping blood. Cas, without breaking eye contact with him, kneels down to grab first aid from his pack. “Wanna help tie this, or are you just going to glare at me some more?”

“I want to tie them,” Dean snaps, glaring at the jackoffs. They're sleeping the sleep of the freshly ass-kicked. One of them kind of looks like he's thinking about coming around, but he's possuming up until the coast is clear, which suits Dean fine. “How'd they cut you?” he asks, noticing for the first time that their only weapons are their fists.

“That was me,” Cas mutters, painting the cut with iodine. “When I caught you, my knife turned. Stupid. Staple this.”

Cas holds the lips of the wound together while Dean staples it shut. A little adhesive dressing, gauze. It's not serious by any means, but Cas's long fingers are red with gore, reminding Dean of the way they'd looked earlier, dripping with paint. The collision of the two memories makes his stomach churn, and he looks away.

“I'm fine, Dean. Jesus. Let's get what we're after and get out of here,” Cas says, packing up the first aid kit. 

“These can't be all of them,” he says, crouching down by the kids. “They're not Crotes.”

“No,” Cas says. “They're just doing their best.”

Dean glances up then, surprised, because he hasn't heard that kind of compassion in Cas's voice for a long time. “You want to take them with us?”

Cas tips one of the boy's faces to the light, his beautiful mouth soft with compassion. Dean is transfixed by him. He must be, to have suggested such a fool thing as taking these losers along; they'll be nothing but a drain, unskilled, addicted, but if Cas nods, then so be it.

The angel's mouth flattens, and a shadow falls across his face. The light leaves his eyes. He is once again tired and pessimistic and above all, done.

“They've got the life they want here,” he says. “No point screwing up their good thing. Let's go.” 

VI.  
Halfway down the hall, even Dean hears the boys wake up and scramble to hide. They have all the stealth capacity of a wrecking ball. 

Cas taps his nose and points to closed doors on either side of the hall. He means there are people in those rooms, content to cower. Dean nods. Maternity suites are the logical places to live if you're going to squat in a hospital, large and roomy with cheerful decor. The important part is, the three boys who lit into them were something like sentries. The fact that they were overpowered means everyone else is going to stay put. That works just fine for Dean. 

They find the nursery with no difficulty, and then there's another problem.

“Makes you want to cry,” Dean says drily, staring through the plate glass.

Someone has arranged baby dolls in all the empty cribs. The dolls are tucked into snug blankets and given booties and caps, surrounded by stuffed animals. The name plates have been filled out in a round, girlish hand. 

“We need all that,” Cas says, pointing. “Baby clothes, blankets.”

“Cas, you aren't really--”

“I am, really,” he says, his voice tight. 

“But you can't,” Dean says. “That's some little girl's—okay, probably a big girl's—anyway, that's somebody's coping mechanism you're talking about.”

“Does that look like coping? Because it looks like toes-off-the-ledge obsession to me.”

“Compare and contrast your little wooden box of shoot-em-up,” Dean snarls.

Cas shrugs. “I'm useful. This isn't. We can make it useful, so we're going to. C'mon, Dean, this is a bad moment to grow a soul.”

Dean sighs and shrugs, because Cas is right. He doesn't like it, but he's right.

As they undress and unwrap the baby dolls and stuff the teddy bears into bags, he thinks he hears someone sniffle sadly, very small and muffled and far away.


	6. Sixth Measure

I.   
Cas has patterned the panes of his windows with shards of colored glass, wiring them in place with silver wrapped round nails. Dean sees only abstract shapes; Cas ain't recreating sunstruck cathedral pictures here, and yet he can't help feeling there's a message he's not getting.

“Like a church in here. Where you been finding these?” Dean taps a green shape.

“Everywhere that's broken.” Cas is at a different window, loosening a red piece to make room for the amber he's set on the sill. “This will look its best at 1630, when the sun slants low...”

When Cas gets arty, Dean wants to tune out, but he can't. Back when... Dean gently thumps the jerry-rigged stained glass window, because goddammit, he's gonna have to learn how to think about this... back when Sam was still around, it was all Sam, all the time, like a filter. The World As Seen Through Responsibility For Sam.

Now there's no Sam, and it's all direct experience, color and pain bursting in on him, and yeah he can wash it out with liquor, but here's Cas, like, doing the backstroke in it. Sure Cas drugs up a helluva lot, but that ain't the same as his drinking, because he creates while Dean destroys. And that's because, as much as he denies it, he's an angel. One of God's messengers. God's talking these days, and Cas hears Him, whether he likes it or not. 

Getting him to admit that, though? Dean had to do some heavy Bible reading back in the Apocalypse, so he's pretty solid on the descriptions of angels and he feels confident saying those prophets missed a big one. Angels? Are stubborn as fuck.

“What gave you this idea?” Dean puts his back to the window and studies the effect. It may not be 1630 yet, but the strong sun already paints the cabin pink and gold. The shadows of Cas's origami mobiles tremble on the wall, edged with shimmering hues. 

“This idea? The sun caught in your eyes.” Cas doesn't look away from his delicate work, wiring the new amber wedge alongside the red he's just rehung, even when Dean makes a hoarse little noise as he loses his air. He strides hastily to the dresser for a long pull at the bottle of beer he left there.

“Relax.” Now Cas turns, grinning, lopsided and sarcastic, one hand on the window holding his work in place. “I know you hate the mushy stuff.”

“That's not it.” Dean wipes the foam from his mouth with the side of his hand. Just... goddammit, this is exactly what's hurting him today. Cas, finding beauty in the most rotten thing. Finding beauty in him, for fuck's sake. And all the while insisting he's nothing, blue eyes dulled by an amphetamine hangover and despair.

Change is coming. The human race is gonna make it. It's time to—climb out of the hole, or something. Do better. Be the leaders these people need, and go kick Lucifer the fuck out of his little brother. Make the world right.

Yeah, he says all this rah-rah pep to himself, but deep down, he's still dead, and he knows it. Getting Lucifer out of Sam is probably gonna kill him, Dean, and that fact remains just a-okay hunky-dory. So he's not renewed. There's no phoenix in this story. Just Cas at his window, doing something beautiful just because.

He deserves to survive. When Dean goes, Cas will not be there, even if he's got to tie the man to a chair, blindfold and gag him.

But he's not going yet, and Cas is still there, so he finishes his beer and, carrying the bottle, walks over to him. He breathes against the nape of his neck, chasing the faint scent of flowers off his skin, and presses the linen of Cas's shirt to his flank. There used to be a supernatural flow of heat in his flesh, like lava beneath his skin. Dean used to think it'd microwave his palm, though it never did. It reassured him when things got bad, to grip Cas on the shoulder and feel that power. Now it's just a man's waist, but it still burns his palm.

What would it have been like, to grab Cas like this back then, to take that risk? Dean whispers his lips over the back of Cas's neck. Cas pretends to ignore him, focused on the wire, but his fingers fumble and the wire slips off the nail. His breathing quickens and stumbles. Down over Cas's hip and there—yes. It's not grace but it is surging and hot like lava beneath skin, beneath cloth as Dean fondles him through his pants.

“Maybe you like the mushy stuff after all,” Cas rasps.

“Try me,” Dean says, and with a twist of his wrist the bottle shatters on the sill, Cas flinching at the explosive noise, the flying glass.

That did the trick. Cas spins and shoves Dean away, Dean staggering back to the center of the room, grinning, buzzed. This is more like it. Cas, pissed off, gathers the shreds of his old power around himself like a gathering storm. The charged air reeks of ozone and roses.

Cas, head down, glaring, closes in on him, pacing through panels of red and violet. “Now you wanna fight?” He grabs Dean's wrist and squeezes. The tendons stand out in his elbow. He's a stringy hippy and he thinks Dean doesn't keep tabs on when he eats and when he skips it in favor of some powder, but goddamn, he's got some grip strength. The broken bottleneck drops to the floor.

“Naw,” Dean says. “I just wanted to get your attention--” 

Cas yanks him in. Still pissed: Dean crashes into him, overbalanced by his strength. Staring hard into him, Dean growls, “And remind you what you are.”

Cas's eyes, cold as the shadows of glaciers. “Yeah, you're always trying to remind me. Hear this, Dean: I know exactly what I am.” His mouth hard on Dean's, his hand hauling Dean's head back, forcing Dean to open for him. “And I know exactly what I'm good at. This is what you want, right?”

“You ain't sayin' no.” Dean fists his hand in Cas's shirt and pulls him down for another hard kiss. Cas left red glowing fingerprints on his wrist that'll darken to bruises tomorrow. It's not the worst mark he's ever left.

Cas kisses him back, drives him back, slams him against the wall so hard the bead curtain rattles. Cas tastes like hot sunshine. That's gotta be more grace at work, because he's sat here and watched Cas sip coffee and otherwise eat air, so by rights he ought to taste like the bottom of a shoe. Like Dean probably does. Not that Cas seems to give a shit as he sucks his tongue, grinds against him with urgent little grunts. Dean brackets him the way he likes and thrusts up against him, his arms filled with writhing angel. Cas always fucks like he's fighting off weasels. He smiles, even though he knows it's because Cas is working off more than simple lust. His anger and frustration come off his skin like a fever.

Lavender. That's the smell of the flower. Years that's bothered him, and it dawns on him now like a revelation, perhaps cued by the purplish light falling on them both. Lavender.

A crunching noise, a sharp pain in his neck, low by the shoulder—he barks a curse, shoves Cas off him, claps a hand to the mark. There's wetness there, spit or blood. 

“You weren't paying attention.” Cas springs at him and Dean's back hits the wall again. The curtain sways with a sussurance of beads whispering against each other. Cas returns to the join of his neck and sucks and Dean shouts, hooks up into him, his hands on Cas's ass grappling him closer as the blood rushes to the hickey—and other places.

“That's better.” Cas rolls his eyes up to his and grins, sly. His palm finds Dean's cock and gives it a shine-up, rubbing the loose fabric of his pants in tight circles over the proud flesh as Dean fights to breathe. “Watch me. Just me.”

He drops to his knees and Dean shoots a panicked glance through the curtain, which is no barrier at all. Cas nips him through the fabric of his pants, just hard enough to make Dean yelp. 

“You're not listening. I said watch me.”

“You put it like that...” Dean means for his voice to sound cocky, but it comes out a plea. He lets the wall support him—he needs it—as Cas undoes his fly.

Dean's done his share of locker-room boasting about the blowjobs he's gotten from dancers and models and skilled betties at the bar, but none of them—not one—had a tongue like Cas's, long and luxe. Cas wraps the head of his cock in hot wet plush, rolling his eyes up to make sure Dean's watching, and he is.

Cas teases him, controlling his thrusts with his fist on his shaft, working the tip of him with his searing tongue until Dean's begging to be let in, and then he only laughs low in his throat. Whenever Dean's eyes flutter shut, he recalls his attention with a hint of teeth. His neck still stings; it creates a healthy respect for Cas's bite. So he's forced to watch as Cas draws him out, lapping, swirling. 

“God, you burn a man down, Cas...”

Cas's moan in response shoots down his spine, igniting nerves like signal fires. Suddenly Cas is beneath him on the floor, his palm rolling over Cas's cock, weeping precum so the stretched linen is soaked wet. Cas bucks into his fist, his tongue running up Dean's throat until he takes it in his mouth. The angel fucks in, thrusting rhythmically, his long hot tongue more or less the way Dean imagines his cock would be if he blew him.

Blowjobs, he doesn't reciprocate; it's dickish of him, but first of all, Cas is the only guy he's ever thought of sucking off, so he knows he'll be lousy, and second of all, if he engages Cas in some kind of prepatory conversation about likes-and-don't-likes, he might hear about other men Cas has blown, and that's one of those conversations that'll lead to someone getting dead. He avoids that pitfall by being a selfish bastard; it's not the first time his inability to communicate has hurt his sex life.

Handjobs, though? Oh, he's there. They were bread and butter back when he was raising Sammy—the big old dodge when a trucker wanted oral, never gonna happen with those guys' hygiene. It's a tarnished skill, and Dean wishes he had something better to offer, but hell, it's all he's got.

Cas's fucking horrible linen pants, not that Dean is any judge of men's fashion but seriously, he's gotta be kidding with this natural-fiber crap, has a fly of wooden buttons. A break in the action while they fuck around getting them undone, their fingers tangling, getting in each other's way until they're both snarling with frustration. In the time it takes to pop five goddamn buttons without busting any of them, Dean's naked. Cas bows up to suck and bite his nipples, Dean muttering incantations of broken syllables as he fumbles blind along the top of the dresser for the oil. 

Slicked up, Cas's pretty prick reflects the shining colors of the window-glass. Dean stares at it, dazzled, the skin around his eyes tight and hot. He probably has the world's dippiest expression on his face, not like Cas sees it, his eyes screwed shut and his lips pulled back from his white teeth as Dean works him, twisting, sliding. Good thing he knows what he's doing because Cas ain't easy to jack off; whoever'd done the circumcision on baby Jimmy's johnson took a bit too much off the top, leaving Cas, beneficiary of said johnson, relatively insensitive at the tip. Might explain how he can get through seven women at a go, poor bastard. Dean himself is uncut and, occasional embarrassment aside, can't imagine life without his foreskin. Still, he can't deny the aesthetic appeal of Cas's thick shaft with its bell-shaped head flushed pink.

It's Cas's turn to beg, and Dean tries to swallow, his throat gone paper-dry, as the angel pounds the floor and writhes. 

“Dean--” Cas's eyes roll open, meet his. “Let me--”

“Not a chance.”

Cas shakes his head, his eyes closing again as Dean rolls his thumb in tight circles beneath his head. Red flags fly on Cas's patrician cheekbones, his pink lips chapped by panting. Dean paints his hole with oil and presses in, finds and strokes the swollen almond inside him; simultaneously, he squeezes Cas's shaft hard to keep him from coming, earning him a glare of blue fire and a harsh-bitten curse. Dean laughs.

And then he's on his back, his arms up by his face with Cas's full weight pressed on his wrists and Cas studying his face, still flushed red and his eyes burning. 

Cas snatches a kiss from him and then it's Dean's turn to have fingers inside him, long, educated ones that know where they're going and why. Cas is merciless when he tops, withdrawing and entering, drawing it out until Dean's body is the third rail of the subway with the train thundering in. Through it all, Cas watches him, holding him in blue, the colored light passing over his face as time passes, a clock made of rainbows. 

“Goddammit, Cas, if you don't let me--”

“You didn't let me.”

“God damn it.”

Dean shuts his eyes as Cas positions him. He's never been so sure about this part, but he exhales and tries to relax as Cas enters him, a mile of hard and hot as hell. He's slick and open, fully prepared, and Cas inside him? Feels amazing. Pain's not the problem. The problem is how the sensation of being filled recalls memories like hellhounds. Fuck Alistair and fuck Hell, it just wasn't fair; this is the most intense pleasure he can think of, and he can't have it without the memory of torture.

Wet heat on his earlobe, Cas's tongue there and on his neck, Cas's long throat thrumming against his chest as he rumbles reassurance: “You feel good, Dean. Dean, this is good, so good.”

Which makes it both better and worse: here he is, with Cas, having this—meaning not Alistair, not in Hell. Worse, though, because it means Cas is taking care of him, and that's the last thing he deserves. Better, maybe, getting struck on the jaw, taking it rough. Maybe. He's never managed to goad Cas into it, so he wouldn't know. 

Not like him, bastard that he is. A night he found Cas giggling, loopy-stoned, when he came back from war with a blood-stained dressing on his chest, adrenaline and rage still burning him alive, yeah, he did him that way. He'll never forgive himself for it, no matter what Cas says; it just ain't gonna happen. So he deserves this care, this gentleness, like, not one little bit.

But there's no getting around it. Cas doesn't negotiate. He gives it the way he likes it, and that's that. Even when tears lash down Dean's cheeks, Cas just laps them up and never punishes him. 

“Dean,” Cas whispers against his mouth. “It's time. Open your eyes. I want to see.”

Each thrust sends a shock up Dean's spinal cord, and when he opens his eyes, he's confused to see nothing but colors bursting like bombs; for a moment, they're inside him, blooms of color intensifying as Cas rides him. But it's just Cas's windows as the light slants magically through the panes. And above him is Cas, gleaming with sweat but quiet, poised, and peaceful. He's gotta be close himself, but he might as well be sitting lotus atop a mountain for all the disturbance he shows.

“Dean.” Cas's voice, rough gravel, reaches down inside him, somehow one with the color and the energy drawn so tight it crackles. His hand closes around Dean's cock, a distant sensation compared to the earthquake building inside him. “Come.”

The colors blur and run together, pull warm and slow like taffy, and then in a moment's alchemy flash to lightning, shattering him as he chokes and coughs and comes, thick whips on his stomach, his chest. Cas floods him with a rippling moan as he sways, lost, between panels of gold and blue light. His eyes roll back, his mouth goes loose, and yeah it's an expression to make God fall out laughing, but Dean knows it's also one of the most beautiful things he'll ever see. 

*

They peel themselves off the floor, silently wring rags in the wash basin and clean themselves. The moment of transcendence passes, leaving gritty spackle on their skins, the hot chlorine odor of semen, and the feeling of their connection ebbing, going soft as their erections. That's all there is—all there ever is—and it leaves Dean cold when it fades.

Cas pulls his pants back on and opens his trunk. He's going for his drugs, and while Dean understands he's just medicating the emptiness, he doesn't want to be here for it. He cleans up the shards of the broken beer bottle while Cas sets himself up. The bottom popped off in one piece, red-brown as the flanks of a fox, and this he sets on Cas's sill for him to find when he beams back down, before he leaves the cabin. 

II.

An unshielded bulb dangles above the table where Dean cleans his guns. He sits beneath it with a disassembled rifle in front of him, using a rag to blot solvent off the freshly-cleaned parts. 

Cas spends a lot of time in his cabin, so he takes pains with it. Dean, not so much. Besides the bulb and the table, there's a cot and a footlocker and a couple of beer fridges. The rest of the room is weapons and gear organized on racks. Dean's spent the evening working his way through a bottle of bourbon and he's got enough of a glow on that the katydid chorus out in the swamp seems like company. 

The hinges of his screen door shrill when Chuck steps in. “Weren't you meaning to oil that?”

After glancing up to see if anyone's with him, Dean shrugs and goes back to what he's doing. “Still opens. What is it?”

Because Chuck's crab-walking into the room in that shuffly way he has when he's nervous. Maybe Dean's cleaning this rifle for another execution tomorrow. At this rate, he'll rival a Crote for kills. 

“Well, um.... Earlier. Like an hour ago? Saint came to say that Juliet, she's—ah...”

Sick. Because of course she is. “Whaddya expect me to do about it? Get Cas.”

“Yeah. Well. We, uh. Tried that, but Cas? He's, um.”

There's no point barking at Chuck when he's like this—it just makes him even more stammery and impossible—but that doesn't mean Dean's not tempted to jump up and roar. At any rate, he knows what Chuck's trying to say. 

“Stoned off his ass and no fucking help.” Which is business as usual after they screw. Honestly, if he gave one shit, he'd knock it off with Cas once and for all so the man would actually function. But the thought of doing without—. Dean's jaw aches, because he's grinding his teeth. He inhales, exhales, puts down the rag and pulls himself together.

“So get Bettina. She's a, whaddya call it.”

“A doula. Yeah, she's with her. And Saint's brewing all his teas. But Dean, we need Cas.”

“And again, I ask, what d'you want from me? Slap him around til his eyes uncross, if you need him that bad.”

Chuck just looks at him, his hands loose by his side and his head down.

He slaps the table and stands. “Fine. Guess you couldn't rustle up a stepstool so you can reach, right?”

“Yeah, not so much with the slapping, thanks.” Chuck swings aside to make room as Dean shoulders through the door, eyeing him. “There's, uhhh, more.”

Dean arrests the screen door at the highest pitch of its shriek, staring at him flatly. 

“I mean, yeah, Juliet's important, but Cas? I think he might really be in trouble.”

“So keep holding me up! That's a great idea!”

Chuck flinches. “Sorry.” 

The tinny slam of the screen door echoes as he strides to Cas's cabin. It's full dark, no moon, but he knows the way. With each step, he gets angrier. The baby's still nothing but a bunch of grapes on the vine, all squishy and fragile. Cas may be a burnout, but he's the only guy in camp with celestial knowledge of the human body, and dammit, it is his responsibility! To hold it together enough to serve in that capacity. 

As long as he serves, Dean's got no room to talk and they both know it, but if he's laying on the floor foaming at the mouth—or, fuck, what if he's not breathing? The shit he messes with can get out of hand in a hurry. Which could be the point. Cas relies on his grace to protect him as he flirts with the blurry border of death. One of these days, that grace will run out. It'll be an accident, except it won't. 

Ordinarily, Dean keeps these thoughts in a box with all his other ugly thoughts. He's beyond pissed off that he has to confront it now.

Long story short, if Dean has to keep living and fighting, so does fucking Castiel. And he'll get that through his head if Dean has to pitch every pill and baggie of his into the goddamn swamp. And now he's running, though Cas's cabin isn't far.

III.  
Cas won't run lights off a generator, preferring oil lamps. The light they shed is antique bronze. 

Seeds and painted beads rain from the curtain when Dean tears it down, as he does every time he blows through it. For Cas, they're meteors streaking across the sky. He's aware of Dean, his tread, his smell, the way his body bends space, but he can't move. He doesn't want to. He's so close. 

In the place where the greater portion of him exists, he's cupped in hands the size of universes. They support him over a great void of nothingness, where the nothing is actually the absence of all definition, which is also total potential. When he finally wriggles off these infinite palms, he'll tumble into that void, and then he can generate any reality, any truth. When he falls, he'll summon God. 

It's tough to crawl over infinite hands, but Castiel didn't expect it to be easy. Years of caroming around the multiverse like a pinball, and he's finally found what he's sought. He won't give up now, not even as Dean rains stinging blows on his physical face. Blood rushes to the lower layers of his skin, capillaries burst with tiny pops, histamine, prostaglandins, all the teeny chemical signals of minute lives—his individual cells—in distress and dying. Teeny lives, like human lives. If he, Castiel, can attend to the cries of his individual human cells suffering, why can't God hear him? Is God not more powerful, more attentive to detail?

He simply is not listening, but Castiel will make him hear. 

So close. His spiritual body inches along, bending strange surfaces with his thoughts, progressing by slow fractions. 

Dean's breath floods his mouth. The taste of Dean. Everything of Dean is his. But he can't think about it now, because any connection to the real world will yank him out of the mighty palms, and he'll lose his place.

Really odd, the combination of drugs that got him here. The bottom of the bottle gave him the idea. When Dean broke the damn thing, he thought, Well, this is it. And after that thought, total silence: his will to live had nothing to say. The animal drives were silent. All the engines of his existence, still. 

It was a level of quiet he hasn't achieved since Heaven. Of course it ended in less than an instant. The world came crashing back with the next beat of his heart and its attendant rush of blood. But he remembered it when he saw Dean's gift, and it inspired him to go back to his trunk.

Nothing that went together, nothing that fit in the collage, but everything with a hallucinogenic bent. He blended and snorted like a mad alchemist, looking for the stone to change madness to sanity and whatever the hell he has with Dean to something that will save them both. He dosed himself almost all the way to death, to the point where his grace was all that stood between himself and the cessation of his heart. And then he dove into the light of his grace.

Where he found the palms.

This is not a feat he can repeat. His grace is already fibrillating like a heart without blood. He has to find God here, or he's not coming back, no matter how Dean dances on his chest, which he is, in between blowing air into his lungs. Let Dean serve as breath and blood, then, if he wishes. Dean has his part to play in God's return, after all.

Castiel crawls over the palms of the unspeakable, heading for the void.


	7. Seventh Measure

I.  
After the fall, Cas lands hard, a sensation like falling out of bed. He scrambles to his feet.

He's in an old barn, sun-warmed boards and silky chaff beneath the bare soles of his feet. Pillars of light stream through breaks in the lofty roof, glittering on drifting motes. Crickets chorus sleepily in the shadows. 

A peaceful place. 

When he experimentally calls, “Father?” the crickets falter. 

A scrape behind him: he whirls. The sound surprised him; his heart should pound, his stomach cramp, but nothing. It's like being an angel again, wearing a mortal body as clothing. Numb, painless, floating without the constant spurts and puffs of hormones and blood chemistry. 

He feels uneasy about that, almost vulnerable, like at any moment the ground might fall away. He's glad he's barefoot.

The scraping: Chuck has his shoulder to the door, shoving it wide enough to admit him. A fawn tiptoes after, sunshine glowing through her leafy ears, silhouetting the branching veins. Her hooves, wet with dew, print the boards with tiny hearts.

“Chuck? The hell are you doing here?”

“You called?” The fawn noses his hand and then regards Cas, ears pricked. Chuck wipes his palm on his cargo pants before he offers it to shake, but Cas ignores it and he lets it drop. “Welcome, anyway. You like?”

“This—is yours?” 

“Sure.” Chuck squints upwards. “Roof could stand some work maybe, but--I dunno, I like the effect.” 

“And it's real?” 

Chuck grins. “Take the situation for what it is, Castiel. You're dying; I'm here. It's everything you ever wanted. So, gotta say, not getting where all the hostility's coming from.”

“Hostility?” The fawn steps in front of Chuck like a bodyguard, stamping her little hooves as Cas's shout rings off the broken rafters. “You abandoned the world! Not to mention the...” He gestures. “Outfit. Wearing castoff prophets went out of style two thousand years ago. Face me yourself, Father—if it's even you.”

Chuck stoops to soothe the fawn. “Oh, this isn't an outfit. I made Chuck.”

“You made everything!” 

“Well, yeah; but Chuck's special. He's me, I'm him—it's really not important. Can we move on?” Chuck squints up against the light. “You don't have a lot of time left.”

“Big deal.” Cas swings away. “Cas, dead. You'll put it in the list.”

Chuck puts his hands on Cas's shoulders, gently turns him to face him. “Did you know, you were always one of my favorites? You were, like, humanity 1.0. I put the seed of imagination in you, Castiel, just to see what you'd do with it. Oh, how watching you struggle inspired me!”

Cas shrugs free of his hands. “Pleased my pain came in handy. Now how about repaying the favor?”

“What favor? Creating you? Does that make sense, or am I having a senior moment?”

Cas surges at him, trips over the fawn, the fawn bleating, Cas contorting as he falls so his full weight doesn't land on her. 

Chuck pulls Cas to his feet and says, “Mind the doe.”

“Mind the--?” Cas shakes his head. “Whatever. I don't care about your Fortress of Solitude, you being Chuck—”

“So what do you care about?”

“You getting off your ass!” Cas gives Chuck a little shake by the front of his shirt for emphasis.

Chuck says quietly, “Just what do you think I've been doing?” 

Cas backs off, careful not to step on the fawn. Despite everything, he still listens to his Father.

“Because of me,” Chuck says, “you have the supplies to carry out your plans. I've kept track of the people joining you so you can govern. I've been by your side—and Dean's—supporting you, every step of the way.”

Cas flinches. He's dead, and he knows it. He gave his life for this audience, but he didn't consult Dean about it; Dean did not agree to his dying. The thought of his grief, his sense of betrayal, hurts, and it's the first pain he's felt in this place.

He shoves it aside. “Juliet's baby? Was that you, too?”

Chuck frowns. “Not directly. I mean, sure, it's good the human race is breeding. Like pandas. Means they have a chance.”

“And you support that chance?” That question's so utterly angelic, logic over emotion—but it needs asking.

“Sure,” Chuck replies. “Love humans. Though, admittedly, not quite like you.”

Cas turns to hide his burning face. He snaps, “So are you coming back or not?”

Chuck chuffs. “No. Me coming back at this point would just negate... everything.”

“Only your power trip,” Cas mutters. “Do it or I'll smite you.”

“You don't understand.” The fawn tiptoes to Cas's thigh, seeking his eyes with hers. He avoids her gaze. 

Behind him, Chuck goes on, “I created humans with both imagination and free will. I thought it was just an experiment, but then—creativity? Blew my mind! They reimagine my world, create new ones, and what they come up with is just! So cool. But with a price, you know? Sometimes what they make is ugly, and I've had to accept that. You do, too.”

The long muscles of Cas's back are hard as stone. 

Chuck concludes, “I made it so humans can create their own destiny. So what, it's ugly. It's still what they've done. I won't get in the way.” 

Cas's chin droops to his chest. “So you'll let us die—for art.”

“Us, Castiel? You wanna stay mortal?” Chuck grins. “Just ask, man. I'll give you grace, bring you to my side. We can go dust off my Throne, let Lucifer play God over here, and move on to the next big thing, if you want.”

Cas glares into his Maker's eyes and says: “Fuck. That.” 

Cas crowds Chuck until his back is to the wall, furious but controlled. “You manipulated these people and then abandoned them, asked sacrifices no human or angel can possibly stand, except one. Dean Winchester. You asked the impossible of him, and he did it. For you.”

Cas is practically speaking into Chuck's mouth, he stands so close. There's no body heat in this place, no breath, nothing but the fawn shrieking protest as Cas invades his Father's space. She springs away when Cas kicks out at her. *Beat it, Bambi,* Dean says in his imagination, and that voice, rasped by decades spent in agony, renews Cas's fury.

“You know how time is in Hell? It took me years to bring him up from the Pit, and all he could do was scream. He was broken! And now, hearing this? I think you should be the one screaming. You should be the one broken.” 

Cas slams Chuck against the wall, drops the man so he slides to the floor.

“If I'm dead,” Cas snarls, standing over him, “I'm taking you with me.”

Chuck blinks, and then, astonishingly, begins to laugh. He pedals to a seated position, blotting tears off his cheeks with his sleeve, still laughing. “You think I ought to justify myself to you? Castiel, you may hate the art, but you're part of it. This fury, this love—it's all part of it.”

“Go fuck yourself!” Cas breaks away, wildly punches the air.

“Possible, but not very likely.”

“You think this is funny?”

Chuck makes a face. “Mostly, absurd? I mean, as rebellions go, this is pretty mild compared to what Lucifer cooked up. Not to give you an inferiority complex or anything.”

“Fuck Lucifer!”

“And creation?”

Cas glares at him, panting. 

Chuck rolls his damp sleeves, staring at him with one eyebrow raised, the last hint of laughter leaving his face. “Can't answer that, huh? How about this—you? What about you?”

“You're pitching me self-preservation?” Cas drips scorn. 

“Yeah,” Chuck says, “looks like I am.” The fawn trots to his side and sniffs at him as he levers himself up. The broken left sole of his scuffed loafers leaves a zig-zag print in the dust.

“The offer stands, Castiel.” He grins, that manic, nervous Chuck grin that makes Cas glare suspiciously now, because behind it he sees his Father, all steely resolve and glory. “You can be a seraph again. It'll be a pretty lonely Holy Host, but as I recall, you weren't a big mixer.” 

Cas says, “I did this to find you, because Dean needs you.” 

“You mean, you did this for Dean.”

Cas sighs. 

“If you're an angel,” Chuck says, “you can protect him.”

“You'd let me interfere with your precious art?” Cas sneers.

Chuck shrugs. “You'd still have imagination. You've seen how much that looks like free will.”

But at a snap of His fingers, Cas would have no choice but do as He said. Risky. Tempting. Dean loves the last crackle of grace inside him; he loves the power that saved him and Sam over and over, until it didn't. Cas opened the door because he obeyed, because he had to, because he didn't have the free will he now has, his grace a radio tuned to static.

But— _he rebelled before,_ and this time, there's no Naomi, no metallic halo of bloody wires, just a mildly interested and laissez-faire God. 

So it's a risk, but it's one worth taking. The Winchesters taught him that. 

“I will not return with you to the Throne or the Gates,” he warns. “I will remain by Dean's side.”

Chuck smiles. “Of course. I can't imagine what I was thinking, even pitching it. Lucifer will be mad he actually has to fight for his toy, but—eh, he always did like opposition. I'll even watch.”

And then his Father drops Chuck. He's still dressed as Chuck, but He shines through the mask as He places His hands on Cas's shoulders. Cas sinks to his knees. If he could feel his grace, it would manifest as the tattered remnants of his wings, all broken pinions, shattered joins. 

It's as though the sun, or what passes for it here, had its wattage turned up; the color leeches from his vision, faded by the subtle white shimmer around the edges of things, which itself bleeds into even more shimmer and pale—the generative energy of God: brahmajyoti, glory...

God's grace.

For one blessed moment, he's a seraph again, mighty wings streaming stars. It's beautiful; it's a lie. He might have the power of suns in his palms, but he is not clean. His sins lair up, waiting for this blast of light to fade. 

Cas grins. Wars raged across time and space for this very privilege, and here he is, thinking heroin could give it a run for its money.

God's grace allows the supplicant to understand—in a way that he will never be able to fully articulate, thus the conflicting reports—the Will of God. As Castiel kneels, allowing that grace to irradiate and rebuild him, he sees:

Himself, and Lucifer—one a mighty archangel, the other only a seraph, but an _imaginative_ seraph—wrestling each other for a thousand years of blight upon the Earth. 

Before that: A tired Dean who retreats and retires, leaves the fight to Cas.

A few abortive attempts to free Sam, which do more harm than good. 

Dean's faded, feeble eyes. Dean dies lonely and Cas misses it; time is slippery for an immortal, and Dean forgets to pray. 

Castiel, the seraph, kneels before God, and he wants to taste Dean again.

The things that separate a soul from God are “sin,” and most of those things are pungent emotions. Cas's longing introduces darkness and marbled shades of gray into God's grace, dulling the light, creating shapes, divisions, separation--

“You turn Me aside for lust?” God booms.

Cas squints into the searing light that is God's true face, tears like lava cracks radiating from his eyes. “No,” he chokes through sobs. "For love.”

II.  
“Dean!”

People shout his name. The whiskey flutes against the glass when he lowers the bottle.

“Dean!”

Someone shakes his shoulder. He raises the bottle to his lips, swallows fire.

Crumpled over there: Cas. Like a goddamn shirt. Green-tinged white. Hey, if his heart were still beating he'd have bruises on his chest where Dean broke his ribs doing CPR, so, you know, bonus. Heart not beating. No bruises. He doesn't have to sit here, getting drunker, thinking about the even-more-bruises-I-gave-Cas aspect of all this. 

“Dean, seriously—goddammit, Dean...!”

The rest of his life unspools, one long, pitted road. Not one person in the whole entire world—except Sam, and thanks brain, for that—who'd understand the whole desperate, scrambling, let's-avert-the-apocalypse slip-n-slide. Shouldering the burden, the responsibility, for this broken world, alone. Nice. Dean lets the rest of the bottle drain down his throat. There's another in Cas's trunk. He's a good host—whoops, watch that tense—always kept a bottle of Jack cuddled up to his weed.

Long ago. God. Years. Cas touched him like he was writing a fucking haiku, so careful and slow. Cas, always the brave one, the strong one. So tender when they started, until that night Dean burst in on him like a fusillade of bullets. Couldn't regret that night more. Changed everything between them.

No more Cas.

Cas is dead.

“C'mon, Dean, Juliet—”

Dean gestures at Cas's body as an explanation for why Juliet's not at the top of his list of fucks right now. Slaps open the trunk, grabs the spare bottle.

The world, though, insists on coalescing even though he'd like to keep it all smears and pastels, except for Cas's corpse, practically wrinkling before his eyes. It's Saint who's raising all the ruckus, and why ain't he off picking leaves or shaking rattles or whatever the fuck he does?

Saint actually tries to haul him to his feet. Saint's over six foot, but he's lost a shit-ton of weight since the end of the world and he's not exactly equal to getting Dean upright. Dean Velcros his ass to the floor and Saint can't budge him.

Saint's tears spatter Cas's floor.

Cas has a red dot on the big vein running off his left thumb. Fuck. He did always like to inject there. If Dean could go back, he'd—pitch all the shit, first of all. Break Cas's fingers. No more handjobs? So the fuck what. No more gunplay, and Cas was a goddamn miracle of a shot no matter how he whined about taking life, fuck it. Cas would still be -here- with -him- and FUCK.

Cas sucks breath with a whoop, long fingers clawing at the boards.

Dean shoves Saint off, rushes to Cas, Cas convulsing, froth on his lips, and Dean rolls him on his side and pounds him on the back and Dean's tears bomb the floor and he screams at Saint. He doesn't hear what he says, but it's bad enough to make Saint go pale—as pale as that guy can go, anyway—and book. So there's that.

Cas pukes, which is seriously gross. Way back in the dawn, this would be the part where Dean drops his puking friend and squirrels, but not now. He's been covered with much worse since the end of the world. So he hangs in there as Cas dribbles, threads of blood in the bright yellow bile.

And all the sudden Dean finds himself raining haymakers down on Cas's upturned cheekbone, roaring curses, Cas watching him with an expression that murders him—not blame, anger, or hate, but total relaxation, which just makes Dean hit him harder, because goddammit, Cas should not look at him like that when he's giving him pain. 

Once he realizes what he's doing, he tries to stop, but Cas almost died.

Almost, nothing: Cas fucking died. On purpose. Willfully. Did this. To him. To himself. Both. So yeah. 

Dean finally flings himself back to the bottle, sitting there like a faithful hound. Grabs it and upends it. His knuckles hurt. 

He's crying again, or still. He doesn't know. His shirt is wet. Salt sears his eyes. Every time he lowers the bottle, the sounds coming from his mouth are so pathetic he has to plug himself back up.

Cas takes the bottle. The next thing Dean knows, he's pressed against Cas's chest, wrapped up in Cas like a coat, Cas saying, “You have to calm down, Dean, because I gotta go.”

“You're not going anywhere,” Dean says, or tries to say—what comes out is barely intelligible—but Cas replies anyway, “You can't stop me.”

“Then I'm coming with you,” he says, and flails to his feet. This is more difficult than he expected; taking down a bottle and a half of whiskey in less than an hour will do that to a man.

Cas shrugs. He pulls on a fresh shirt, bruises glowing like neon signs on his ribs and chest and face. All courtesy of Dean Break-What-I-Touch Winchester. Cas doubles in his drunken vision and Dean can't stop marvelling at him. Alive. Standing. Getting dressed, washing his hands and face, swishing hydrogen peroxide in his mouth and spitting out the foam.

It's not worth it to ask how. Both he and Sam came back from the dead over and over only to be greeted with a shrug. Fact is, they're all doomed to keep their arms and legs inside this ride until the ride operator Himself brings it to a halt. 

God. That's what happened. And now Casti-fucking-el will have to acknowledge that God is meddling in their story, and Juliet's baby is emblematic of a new era. 

But Cas doesn't look like, or move like, a man who just rediscovered his faith. He looks and moves like someone who was dead a few minutes ago. So Dean puts his shoulder under his and wraps his arm around his hips to balance him as he leans to grab the jumpkit, which is just a duffel with the more useful drugs and wrappings neatly organized. 

Dean is real good at being way too drunk. The trick is to imagine yourself on a boat in a storm. You just make sure you plant your foot with every step you take. It slows you down, and you get this tell-tale alcoholic lumber thing going, but you don't fall down and that's the point.

When they reach Juliet's cabin, Cas dumps him at a table in the corner and someone puts a bottle in front of him, because he's got these troops whipped into shape, by gum. He feels the corners of his mouth pulled into a loose, probably terrifying, smile. He can't stop smiling. Cas is alive. Cas takes Juliet's pulse, feels her stomach, gets down between her legs and stares. He looks like he's been to Hell and he moves like someone lubed his joints with ground glass, but he's alive. 

Everyone in camp seems crowded in this cabin, except Chuck. Chuck's probably out in the yard muttering to himself. Crowds and confined spaces don't mix with that guy.

“It's fine,” Cas says at last, and the troops exhale in unison, a breezy sound of relief. He bends over Juliet's head, says something too quiet to hear, and she nods. She shines with sweat, and there's an odor in this cabin not unlike the odor in Cas's: she's been heaving her guts out all evening, too. 

“Some women bleed in the first trimester,” he says to the room at large, his voice dropping in and out like a bad radio station. “It doesn't mean she's going to miscarry. I want you to mix this into your water and sip slowly when you drink. Saint, that tea? Three cups a day, evenly spaced. And, Juliet? The most important thing you can do for your baby is stay calm. I'll leave a few herbs here that'll help in case of emergency, but those breathing exercises I taught you'll do more good, in the long run.” Cas smiles down at her—not as reassuring as it could be, given his puffy lips and bloody teeth. 

“And you,” Dahl says at Dean's elbow, “need to lay off the redneck domestic abuse.”

Dean startles. He hadn't heard her approach, and Dahl, for all her sniper mastery, is not built for stealth.

“Circumstances,” he says.

“My ass,” she retorts. “If you can't handle his truth, get the fuck up out his life. I don't wanna see that pretty man walking around with done-told-you-twice makeup ever again. You hear me?” 

Dean glares at her. Says distinctly, “Circumstances.”

She farts through closed lips. 

“But I hear you,” he says, because yeah, he's not proud of himself. 

A hand wraps around his on the bottle neck. Cas stands there. 

“I died tonight in a stupid fucking way,” he says, staring Dahl straight in the eyes. “Dean had feelings about that, for which I'm grateful. Yeah, my face hurts, but I'm here to be pissed off about it, because of him.”

Dahl leans across the table. “Got some home truths for you, too, angel. Love ain't defined by how much pain you can cause a man. So you straighten up and fly right, because if you crash and burn, you know he gonna be right there, burning too. And all us with him.”

Cas grins crookedly. “Interestingly enough, I'm aware of that.” He grunts as he puts his shoulder under Dean's arm and lifts. “C'mon, Dean. You've given yourself alcohol poisoning, or I'm a leopard. Stayin' with me tonight—d'you wanna actually stand, or are we dragging you home?”

Dragging.


	8. Eighth Measure

I.  
Today they wash and tune the fleet of vehicles. Dean's got people detailed to the motor pool, but he still likes to inspect the rigs periodically to satisfy himself no one's shirking.

Cas helps. Since he doesn't understand the first thing about engines, Dean won't let him anywhere near an open hood, but he can certainly wax and buff: same skill set as prepping a wall for a mural.

They work in silence. Dean won't look at him, swings wide when he moves around him. He hasn't touched him since the morning he woke up, puking sick with a hangover from hell, and caught Cas's eye across the cabin where he stood, binding his bruised ribs with an Ace wrap. He dragged himself out of bed to help secure the Velcro, but that was all.

Three days of this. Cas made it a point to hang around the motor pool, to be available when Dean strode in and called “Inspection,” just so Dean couldn't avoid him, but now that they're here, working side-by-side, he can't find a way through Dean's icy-slick attitude. 

Dean straightens up from the engine he's operating on, puts the wrench down with care, and clears his throat. “You seen Chuck around anywhere?” 

It's lame, but it's an opener. Unfortunately, it's not one Cas can respond to, not really. He buffs the side of the Jeep, soapy circles obscuring the reflection of his face. 

“I haven't,” he says. 

“Bad time for him to go walkabout,” Dean says. “S'not like him.”

“No, it's not,” Cas says. 

Dean clears his throat again as that topic kicks its little feet and dies. For awhile, the only sound is the clink of his tools and the splash as Cas drowns the sponge in the bucket of soapy water.

Then he breaks.

“Okay, what's with you?” 

Cas sits back on his heels and squints up the side of the Jeep at him, because that's the old Dean talking, all raw and hoarse, and so deserves his undivided attention. 

“You try to die, now you're giving me the friggin' silent treatment—what gives? You that mad I saved you?”

“You're laboring under a misapprehension,” Cas says. “I wasn't trying to die.” 

“Coulda fooled me, what with the not breathing and all. Goddamn needle still hanging out your arm, you junkie nutsack!” Dean slams the hood so hard, the whole Jeep jumps. 

Cas sighs, but only to buy himself time. His first impulse is to tell Dean everything, but of course he can't. Dean can't ever know God has well and truly left, taking the last shreds of Cas's grace with Him.

He has to say something. The whole episode is too huge to sweep under the “oops, I fucked up,” rug, at least not without some tiresome conversation about what he can and cannot take recreationally, which he's not prepared to have. 

There's an old Winchester trick that'll come in handy about now. Tell the truth, but not all of it; tell the smallest, least important part of the truth, and make it sound like the whole world. 

“My grace. It's gone,” he says. 

“Yeah, wasn't that yesterday's headline?” 

Cas grins bitterly. “It was. The day before that, too, but I mean it, Dean: it's really gone. I'm fully human, halitosis and all.”

Then Dean does something weird. He leans over the hood, avoiding Cas's face when he tips it up, thinking he must want a kiss, and sniffs his scalp. Cas sits quietly as the tiny gusts of Dean's exhalations tickle the tips of his ears, waiting to see what this is about.

Dean straightens; dimples dent the corners of his downturned mouth. 

“Guess so,” he says. He turns away and starts loading his tools back into the box, shoulders bent beneath an invisible weight.

And Cas exhales, stomach sinking. He hoped it wouldn't be like this, but—wrong again, obviously. It's like the old days, when his grace ebbed just as the fight with Lucifer became intense. Made Dean desperate, afraid. Drove Sam to Lucifer. His grace was always the one thing that stood between Dean and total responsibility for the world, and now it's gone for good. 

“How's it feel?” Dean asks, not turning.

Cas knows what he means. He finishes rinsing as he considers his answer. “Not as bad as I feared,” he says at last. “It's strange. It almost feels like there's a little bit left, but I guess that's just... being alive. Right?”

Dean snorts. “If you call this being alive.”

Cas shrugs, though Dean can't see him. “I still paint,” he says. “I still make things, Dean. I thought that was just my grace twitching in its death throes but... I still want to create.”

“Plenty of people do,” Dean says. “Always more of a surprise to me, seein' an angel dabble in fingerpaints, to be honest.”

Cas wrings the sponge and sets it on the bench to dry. He's just stopped himself from musing aloud about how God gave him imagination, and whether that plays into creativity. He's stopped himself, but he's so jammed up, he can't say anything else.

“I didn't mean that as an insult, Cas,” Dean says, misinterpreting his silence. Audibly striving for a lighter tone, he adds, “In fact—leaving aside the William S Burroughs aspects of your life—I envy it.”

“You do, huh?” Cas grins at him over his shoulder. “You should try it. Doesn't take a lot of skill to throw colors together.”

Dean shakes his head. “Nah, nah, we're not going there. I'm not about to make any happy trees, okay?”

Cas surprises himself laughing and turns to face him fully. Dean's wet shirt clings to his chest and stomach. There's a smear of grease across his forehead. 

He shifts his weight as Cas stares at him. “The hell's so funny?” he asks, fronting anger.

Cas can barely speak through his giggles. “You may not be making any trees, but you definitely cause some wood.”

“Jesus tapdancing Christ, that's awful,” Dean says, then grunts out a laugh himself as he cleans his hands with a rag.

II.  
There's something sad about how much they want to make this up, Cas thinks as they walk to his cabin. They trade wood and lumber puns that get worse and worse, laughing, passing Dean's flask. When they pass through the entrance (Cas's ribs hurt too bad to string yet another bead curtain; given that he's already replaced it twice, he's rethinking the whole idea), Cas goes straight to the easel, and Dean goes straight to the bottle sitting on top the dresser.

He stares at the amber fluid as it films the side of the glass. “Been thinking,” he says. 

Cas studies his wood panel canvas. It's too early to tell if he'll like the finished painting or not; right now it's at that fetal stage where everything looks ugly.

“I don't want to hear it,” he says, and it comes out so softly he's not sure Dean will hear. 

Dean does, though. “Actually, you do. Wanna make a deal with you.” 

“Cos that always works out so well,” Cas snorts. He jabs his brush at the canvas, no plan, just to see what happens. He expected the final death of his grace to cure him of this, or at least change it, but though everything else feels different—the way his skin rides his muscles, the quality of his dreams—this one thing remains the same. He likes to mark the world. 

But God is gone for good, and today, watching the paint sweep across the white canvas doesn't thrill him. He sets the brush back down.

“What deal?” he asks.

Dean goes to the window and stands there in profile, his drink in his hand. The day is too cloudy to throw colors. In his mind's eye, Cas breaks Dean into polygons and sets him in the pane. He belongs there just as he is, in his grease-streaked undershirt and dirty camo pants, his green eyes abstracted, his hair a crown of thorns.

“I was so fucking mad at you, I was gonna run your hands through a steam press. Then I got to thinking. We're both fucked, you know.”

“No argument.”

“Anyone tries prying this outta my hands....” He shakes his head and raises the glass, sips and grimaces with a flash of teeth. “But we keep fighting, and that's what counts. Now more than ever.”

Cas looks down at his palette. Juliet's still suffering through one miserable shit of a pregnancy, though the anti-nausea meds are helping. She'll be on bed rest by the third trimester if things don't get better. He hasn't shared that information with Dean; Dean still finds the fact of her pregnancy so comforting. All the troops do. 

Dean takes a deep breath. “Facts are facts. You got no grace. You're human, full stop. So this denial you got going on, it's gotta stop. Cos I can't do this without you.”

“That's a lie,” Cas says, and Dean faces him, glaring. “Years ago, sure, you'd say that, and I'd believe it. You've changed since Sam.”

Dean sets the glass down on the sill, frowning. “Not everything's about Sam. And don't think I don't see you changing the subject. We're talking about you, pushing crap into your veins. I want it done, Cas. Over with.”

“That's all, though?” Cas asks.

“Yeah, that's it. Smoke or swallow, that's still on the table. I can't stop you doing whatever the hell you wanna do, but I'm asking. Curb the hard shit, that's all.”

“You said this was a deal,” Cas says. “What do I get?”

“A long life and healthy grandchildren?” Dean laughs bitterly and picks his drink back up. “You've never asked me for a goddamn thing. I can't barter when I got nothing you want.”

Cas exhales softly. That hurt. Dean has everything he wants, and he still, even after all this, won't believe it. 

“I want you to pick up this brush,” he says. 

“Done,” Dean says immediately, and strides across the cabin. He plucks the brush from Cas's fingers, standing so close Cas can taste the alcohol on his breath.

He snatches a kiss. Why not? Dean bites at his lower lip and then turns to the canvas, his head down, eyebrows lowered in a fierce glare.

There's just a few exploratory strokes there already, not making anything as yet. Dean keeps glaring, so Cas says, grinning, “I meant for you to use that brush, Dean.”

“And do what with it?”

Cas tips his head and raises his eyebrows. He can think of a few things. Dean shoots him a “yeah, yeah, asshole” face and swabs the bristles through the swatch of green on the palette.

“Okay,” Cas says. “Now make a mark.”

Dean stares at the canvas, brush poised, then breaks and spins towards him. “I'm gonna suck,” he complains.

“Someone got a gun to your head? New York Times art critic just stroll into camp? Mark the damn canvas.” Cas takes the drink from Dean's hand and finishes it. He lowers the glass and grins. “Or I could smoke you up.”

Dean groans. He can pound a bottle of whiskey and hold it, but marijuana makes him puke almost immediately.

“Just—fuck everything,” Cas says, crossing to the dresser for the bottle. He refills Dean's glass and takes a hit from the neck himself, still talking as he walks back. “This is the one thing you can do where even if you fuck it up, who cares? It doesn't matter. No consequences.”

Dean glances at him, sees the glass and the bottle. Takes the bottle. Cas grins.

“Mark the canvas,” he says.


	9. Ninth Measure

I.  
Shards of glass and metal clink as Juliet parts the junk curtain Cas has hung instead of beads, waking him. 

Her color is better than it was last week. Still, Cas put her on bed rest for a reason, so his heart speeds up from fear for her as he swings his legs over the side of the bed. 

“No, no, I'm all right,” she says, smiling and raising her hand to slow him. “Better, actually. Thought I'd get some exercise maybe?”

“You should be in bed,” Cas says. 

“I'm sick of my bed,” she says. Her long eyelashes flutter down to shield her toffee-colored eyes as Cas draws near. Then she looks up, smiling.

Cas shifts his weight. 

“Heard you haven't had a service in awhile,” she says. “That's what the girls say, anyway.”

“There's no more need,” he says, looking down and away. “They served their purpose. Come in.”

“So, no more? Never again? Blasphemy.” Juliet gives him a sidelong smile as she steps into the cabin. 

“How's the nausea?”

“Better. Everything's better. I think the little monster's settling in.” She pets her palm over the curve of her stomach. “I just wish I knew what I'm having.”

“An infant,” Cas says.

“Smartass,” she says. “Tee says she thinks it's a boy, because I'm carrying low. I don't know what that means. Like, if there's carrying low and carrying high, what would carrying in the middle look like?”

“I have no idea. Lay down there.”

The same findings on exam as always: a nervous young woman suffering through a difficult pregnancy in less than ideal circumstances. Juliet's cervix gives Cas fits; it's hard to find, and half the time, it looks soft. This time it's shut tight, though there's still a little blood in the vaginal vault. Juliet's been bleeding off and on this whole pregnancy.

“You're fine,” he says. “Eating enough?” She nods. “Sleeping well?” She nods. “Good.” He pats her hand. “I'll see you next week.”

He helps her stand. Once she's on her feet, she keeps holding his hand, looking into his eyes. She's a pretty young woman with a round face and full lips which part a little, showing her white teeth, pink tongue. She licks her lower lip.

“Cas?” she asks. “Have you thought about how likely it is... that this is yours?”

Inside, he groans, but he tries to keep it off his face. He fucked her, so yeah, he's thought about it; if she wants to talk about it now, he has to participate. His reluctance is just him being a prick.

“Of course,” he says. 

“Would you be happy if it were?” 

He looks down at their linked hands and squeezes her fingers. “Honestly, Juliet, I wouldn't,” he says. “Not because you don't deserve to be loved, and not because that baby doesn't deserve a father, but because you both deserve to make a family with someone better than I am.”

She dips her head, smiling, but the smile twists painfully at the corners. “But you know so much,” she whispers.

“Except how to love someone,” he says. “I'm as old as the Earth, but in terms of emotions? I'm a toddler. You have better options.”

“You only say that because of what you and Dean do to each other,” she mumbles down at their linked hands, her cheeks glowing hot at her daring. “But, Cas, have you ever thought that maybe that's just Dean?”

In his memory, a cable creaks. He breaks her grip. “Yeah, I have,” he says, turning away from her, “but it's me, too. Goodbye, Juliet.”

II.  
Dean reckons Chuck got ganked out in the swamp, ditzing around somewhere. Crotes don't venture far from their swarms in the cities, but the world's still full of Jefferson Starships and vampires and werewolves: all the beasts and goblins he used to fight. He spent a week hammered, out of guilt, and then appointed Wednesday to Chuck's position.

Wednesday, despite her crippling OCD—or maybe because of it—turned out to be kind of a genius. Within two weeks, she had Chuck's warehouse tagged and categorized, and even started submitting yields on the mealworm crop, which got rendered into meal to stretch their flour. Cas didn't tell Dean his morning waffles were partially made of insects, a fact he tried very hard to ignore himself.

Wednesday taps her way along the desk and shuffles in place before she hands over the week's list of needs, printed in handwriting as regular as a computer font. She's not big on talking. Cas appreciates that. 

He pushes open the shrieking storm door and steps into Dean's cabin, list in hand. The maps are already spread out on the table, but Dean's not there. The setting sun glows smeary peach through dirt-encrusted windows, cut in half by half-drawn army green shades.

How Spartan this is. Cas always marvels. Duty, discipline, liquor and guns. It's all business here.

He sits down in a hard chair in the light of the sun and leans back, propping his feet on the table, and then, like a frisson of electricity down his spine, he feels something like grace. He almost falls over. 

This has been happening to him, and he doesn't know if it's his real grace fritzing from somewhere deep down inside or just his memories of it, but it always fades almost immediately, leaving him with nothing but fresh grief at its passing. To feel powerful, to feel safe and loved and at peace, and then to have it torn away: it's torture. 

He pats his pockets, but he doesn't have anything on him to dull this pain—at least, not anything he can take before a planning session with Dean.

The storm door shrieks.

“What's with you?” Dean asks.

“Nothing,” Cas stammers. He puts his feet back up on the table and tries to collect himself. Not Dean's problem, whatever it is. 

“Got the list?” he asks, and then they're planning.

The maps show the places they've already hit and stripped, and Cas mines news reports for places currently in the grip of the virus, as well as towns past the first wave of madness. He and Dean discuss this, circling the table, arguing sometimes—Dean still has occasional flashes of “let's go save the villagers” that Cas feels obligated to talk him down from—until they reach a consensus and plan the mission. 

All normal. Until Dean says, “Okay, that takes care of business. Now let's talk about Detroit.”

Cas goes still. “What about it?”

“We know the devil's up there,” Dean says. “We wait much longer, winter'll shut us down. After tomorrow night's run, we'll be as stocked as we can be, so we can take the time.”

“To pay the devil a visit? Great idea, considering all we can do when we get there is give him a jaunty wave before he blows us up.”

Dean leans over the table, settling on his forearms. His green eyes oddly vulnerable. “Cas, I've been thinking.”

“God. This I have to hear.”

“Would you just shut up? This whole time, Lucifer's been squatting up there, he coulda taken us out. I'm sure he knows where we are, what we're doing. Probably knows about the kid. If he's hellbent on destroying humanity, you'd think that'd bring him down, but nothing. Nothing!”

“And so, what? You want to ask him?” Cas swings his boots off the table and leans in, too. “Dean, I can guarantee you, Lucifer is not going to give answers to any of your questions. The only thing he's going to give is a merry grin as he wipes you off his fingers.”

“He's had a whole year to go aggro, and he hasn't.” Dean stares steadily into Cas's eyes. The harsh light from the hanging, unshaded bulb carves the bones of his face. “I think he's taken the win.”

“Which, of course, means he's up for socializing over a six-pack and a bucket of wings.” Cas throws a hand in the air. “No, Dean. Forget it. It's a stupid, bad idea.”

“No one's saying you have to go.” 

Cas ignores that, because no one's going to Detroit, not him, not Dean, and so seating arrangements aren't up for discussion.

“This doesn't have a thing to do with Lucifer,” Cas says, pointing his finger at Dean, uncoiling like a cobra. “You think Sam's still in there, or they have some kind of timeshare arrangement, or some other shit-for-brains fantasy that is going! To get! You killed!” 

Cas crumples maps beneath his palms as he screams in Dean's face; the veins stand out on Dean's neck as he matches him decibel for decibel. 

“We spent this whole damn time thinking it was him or us, Cas, but he's left us alone, and whether that's down to Sammy or God or, or Pennywhistle the goddamn clown—”

“I'm thinking we oughtta just return the goddamn favor!”

“Or maybe we oughtta see what kinda world it's gonna be for that kid out there, and the ones who follow!” Dean stabs his finger towards the door.

The same theme. Dean won't let go of it. It's just an excuse, though; underneath it all, he's pounding on the same old Sammy drum.

Cas sinks down on the chair, puts his head in his hands. So close to punching Dean just then. The last time he recalls feeling that way, Dean had been about to surrender to Michael—and that memory just seems ironic, now. 

Well, he was wrong then. Who's to say he's not wrong now? Yet he feels it in his bones...

“If you go to treat with the devil, you will die,” he says. He squeezes his skull between his palms, rubs tight circles in his hard scalp with his fingertips. “I can't let you take that risk. Dean, don't make me stop you.”

“Stop me? Now, that's funny,” Dean says. He refreshes his glass of bourbon and sits down across frm him. “What is this, Cas? Why's this so hard to understand? Are you—are ya jealous, or—?”

The corner of Cas's mouth tips up, wry, as he eyes him. “You forget, Dean: we're talking about my brother, too. I know him every bit as well as you know Sam. He plays a long game—always has.”

“That may well be,” Dean says, slugging bourbon. “But we'll never know unless we check it out.”

Cas gets up and pours himself a glass, uses it to wash down a painkiller, hoping to soothe the pounding in his head before it explodes.

“Okay, agreed,” he says, “but... could you wait? Until Juliet's baby's born? Cos that might well be the catalyst that causes Lucifer to haul his meatsuit five hundred miles.” 

Dean shoots the remainder of his bourbon, wincing as it slams home. When the expression clears, he looks as depressed as Cas feels, sitting there beneath the naked bulb, his face haggard. 

“Okay,” he says at last, staring at Cas beneath heavy eyelids at the card table that serves him as a bar. “Okay.”

III.  
Camp Chitaqua is far enough out in the sticks that the night sky can actually do its thing. It's shattered by stars, so many the sky turns purple with them. 

Last year Cas organized the troops to build a kind of outdoor pavilion on one of the roofs. He hung a bunch of hammocks and put out like a million fat candles and sometimes the troops party there when the weather's nice. 

Dean carries the bottle of bourbon. Cas drags on a joint. It's not so much that they talked about hanging out up here; more like they both, silently, felt the need to be somewhere that wasn't Cas's cabin, with all the memories there, or Dean's place, with their shouts still echoing off the walls. 

The outdoor pavilion has a few separate entrances: they pick the ladder. As they climb, Dean hears people booking through the trap door leading back down into the building. The troops, giving them their space, again. 

Empty longnecks stand sentry in front of a group of candles. The gold streaks down their glassy spines extinguish, one by one, as Cas pinches out the flames. Dean keeps his distance. He's starting to pitch and roll—he's been working this bottle of bourbon over for awhile now, and it's starting to give up its secrets—and the last thing he needs is to knock those bastards over, set them rolling, and slip on one to tumble to his fool death.

He settles on a big hammock, gingerly swinging his ill-coordinated body into it. It rocks with the motion, blending nicely with the gentle swaying sensation of the alcohol in his brain. The stars look so close, he thinks he can grab a handful and stick them in his pocket. 

The heavy scent of marijuana dissipates as Cas finishes his joint. Though Dean can't tolerate the high, the smell alone relaxes him. Way back when, the stoned customers were the friendly ones, the safe ones. They might push, but they never got violent, and they always had some quality eats. 

He angles himself so Cas can fit himself against his body as Cas joins him on the hammock. Cas is not a small dude—he's just so lean and proportionate he seems that way. His body matches Dean's point for point, only a little more narrow in the ribs, the shoulders. Dean palms the blade of his hipbone, but there's no surging energy, only peace; they're all wore out. 

They still haven't spoken. No need to cock this up with a buncha words. They rock, Cas with his dozy face tucked in the join between Dean's neck and shoulder, and Dean watches the stars wheel overhead.

He sleeps.

IV.  
With dawn, comes screaming.

Dean startles so savagely he dumps them both on the roof. He comes up in a crouch, gun at the ready.

Cas fights his way through tangled memories of Crotes and riots, desperately snatching details to ground himself in the world: gritty rooftop under his palms, morning mist tinted peach, pain where he hit the deck. The screaming goes on and on.

Dean recovers first. He tucks the gun back in the waistband of his jeans and hauls Cas to his feet. He eyes him, gives him a little shake. “You good?” he asks. 

“Yeah, Dean.” Cas scrubs his face and sucks in air. It tastes like decay. Maples and oaks burn yellow and orange. There's a little girl holding her intestines, shrieking fury at her untimely death. Insects streak by like tracer rounds.

“Look at me. Hey! Cas! Look at me. Look at me. They need you, man. You gotta pull it together now.”

Breathe. Easy. Easy. Fuck. 

Dean stares at him for a beat more, then nods. His lips press into a thin, unhappy line. 

“Something about Juliet,” he says, green-tinged, pale. “Let's go.”

Smash-cut to Juliet's cabin. The jumpkit hangs heavy in Cas's hand, but he doesn't remember going to his cabin to get it.

Dean bellows an order; it rings into a sudden silence as most everyone shuts up, clears out. The air in here smells like blood.

It smells like blood because there _is_ blood: soaking Juliet's cot, strings of congealed gore trembling off the frame. The girls she shares space with huddle in the corner, fists stuffed against their squared-off, shaking mouths, eyes wide with horror.

Juliet is pale. Her fingers, when Cas touches them, are cold.

Here's the thing: even as the greater part of him flashes through every atrocity of the first days of the Apocalypse, when it was all falling down and Dean was fighting the Army on one side and Crotes on the other, when he was still an angel but in denial about his dying grace (when he touched the little girl's forehead, all she did was glare at him with loathing and then die), he still functions, pretty much on autopilot. Juliet's vital signs: nope. Cause of death: hemorrhage. Fetal viability: at seven months? Nil. But the baby is half-delivered, breech, and he can't leave it that way; it's too horrible and pathetic, that little life that's not to be jammed like a cork in a bottle.

One tiny foot, the toes mere indented suggestions, twitches. 

Then Cas snaps shut like a fan: focused. He scoops the infant out like taking flesh from a watermelon, clamps and cuts the umbilical cord, ignoring the afterbirth for now—it won't bother Juliet; nothing's ever gonna bother her again. He wipes blood and goo off the kid's face, delicately clears its nostrils with a syringe. It's a boy, he notes in passing, before going back to work—kid's not breathing yet—

But it's not right. Something's not right. It's not just that this kid is whoa premature, and never gonna make it, even if it's alive for the moment. It's squodgy, bruise-red and paper-skinned, vessels pumping visibly along its frail skull, but—

When the truth penetrates, it flash-freezes his blood. Interesting, that. He always thought it was just a cliche, but it's exactly what happens: his blood freezes, so he freezes, unable to move. Cold inside. 

The fetus, the kid, the infant, the child, Juliet's son, gives one more feeble kick and dies.


	10. Tenth Measure

I.  
The late afternoon light in Dean's cabin is the same flat, vulgar yellow as a sitcom's set.

All day, the troops mourned. There was a funeral. The attending physician of failure, Cas, held the infant, wrapped in white, and laid it on Juliet's breast before the first clods of dirt rained down. Stoned, he tells Dean afterwards he didn't hear a word of the service, too terrfied he'd spasm and crush the thing. “Like a jelly donut,” he said, "and then I'd be crazy, and then I'd be done.”

They're all done for the time being. Camp Chitaqua? Canceled.

Dean's drunk. Cas plays with a blue rubber tourniquet, stretching it out, letting it snap, and Dean knows he wants to shoot, but he holds himself to smoking. Keeping up their end of the bargain. 

When faced with catastrophe, Dean disengages the hooks that bind him to the world. He goes inwards. He tells himself he never felt hope. Never believed God had a hand in Juliet's pregnancy. Dude's still missing, same as ever.

“Did the sonuvabitch even exist in the first place?” he explodes.

 _Snap_ , goes the tourniquet.

Cas says, voice dragging, “When I was in the choir, I sang to a glow so intense it seared even an angel's eyes. We could not look at it. We destroyed whole dimensions to pass through the Glory, close enough to behold God's face. I won one of those battles.” 

He takes a hit, exhales, and shrugs. “Wasn't worth it.”

Dean whiffles a bitter laugh through his nose. 

Cas slops like a spilled drink all over the battered plaid couch where Dean sleeps more often than not. His ribs press against the dirty pillow still propped against one of the broken-down arms. When Dean flops down practically on top of him, the whole rig sags.

The cheap-cologne-and-burned-vinegar smell of whatever the hell it is Cas is smoking makes Dean want to sneeze. He buries his nose in the bottle to kill it. 

Cas mutters, “Fuck it.” Tosses the tourniquet, but he's too limp to give it any air time. It lands on his thigh. Says, “Dean, I saw God.”

Dean snorts the Wild Turkey out of sheer astonishment, which is a very sad fucking day for him as it sears his sinuses and sends tears rolling down his cheeks. He didn't cry this hard the first time Sammy died, for fuck's sakes. 

As he wipes his face, Cas takes the bottle from him and sets it aside. “It was Chuck,” he continues, slow, stoned, truthful at last, the deceitful prick. “Asked if I wanted to leave this cruel world behind. Didn't like my answer. Sent me back. Then left.”

“Did he say anything about Juliet? How about Lucifer?” Dean lunges for the bottle, takes a swig. “We some kind of sick experiment? See how much we can take before we crack?”

“Shh.” Cas rolls his head to look at him, because Dean's jumped back up to his feet. “Dad's a dick,” he says. “Doesn't change how Juliet got pregnant. Might mean others will, too.”

He says this like it's the last thing in the world that matters. His pipe's gone out and that takes priority.

Pissed over all this, Dean roars, “What point if every woman in this camp gets a bun in the oven, if all they bake is clover-headed monsters?”

Cas shrugs as he exhales. “So maybe Lucifer wins after all. Or maybe Juliet just had a fucked-up pregnancy. It happens.” 

Dean paces taking full swallows from the bottle. When he passes the west windows, the sun shrieks at him.

He mutters, “But he's gone now. Humanity's over. Done.” 

Cas sighs. “Would you quit flinging yourself around the room?”

“Cas, tell me you don't feel this.”

“Feel what?” 

Dean stops and stares, and the old pain snaps like Cas's stupid blue rubber band: he's the one who's fucked and wrong, feels too much, too strongly. He's the one who screams with nightmares in which people die and he can't save them, or—his favorites—the ones where he's racked and punished in Hell. Thirty years of dismemberment and immolation, and it wasn't enough, he's gotta replay it every night for the rest of his life. 

There's a philosophy he got exposed to once, maybe some co-ed he banged, he doesn't know, but it goes like this: moment by moment, he creates his world. It's a reflection of himself, exactly as broken and corrupt as he is, so when he loathes and rails against it, when he wishes it dead and done so it'll stop hurting him, what he's really against? Is his own idiot, jacked-up _self._

Most days, most minutes, he can deal with that: he looks at Cas or the stained-glass collage or his paintings and sees the balance of color and light, or he admires the intricate machinery, the _logic_ , in a car engine or a good gun. When his men obey and the mission goes right, he feels the correctness of the math. It's right, so he's right, and his fuck-ups are, on a galactic scale, probably minor. Probably.

Yeah, that thought process? Not working so well right now. He upends the bottle and sucks from it.

Cas rolls his eyes. “I will never understand,” he says, struggling upright, “why you insist on self-medicating with a substance that not only sickens you, but doesn't even work. Stop marinating in your drama and hit this.”

He offers the pipe, eyebrows raised. His beautiful fingers cup the stem lightly. In his heavy-lidded, shadowed eyes, the conviction this will help; a silent plea for Dean to at least try.

Dean flashes through the flex and play of Cas's lips beneath his own; the curve of his skull in the palm of his hand; bathing in the river together, Cas beaming at the novelty of mud squishing between his toes, flowing water fanning through his fingers, the organized silver wheel and dart of minnows.

It's Dean fault that innocence long since turned into this. And “this,” it can be argued—Cas _has_ argued—is an effective method of handling the strain of their new lives.

But he can't. He swallows against rising nausea, cold straight to his bones. In a day of horror, this is the most horrifying moment. It's interesting: he didn't know the sickness could go this deep. And yet he can't. He meets Cas's eyes, feeling stripped, flayed, flensed; Cas flinches at whatever message he receives and lowers the pipe, and that's good, but this is too much. He's going to scream.

Not looking at him, he whispers, “Cas, get out.”

II.  
For a week or so, Dean's life is pretty much filmed by the Blair Witch crew, all jolting camera and motion sickness. In a cold autumn drizzle, he staggers past a group taking shelter beneath a maple, wet-shining leaves like blood spoor on the ground: Bettina, Saint, even callow Buster; Kit ripples to her feet from her crouch when she spots him. Dahl runs a string of beads through her fingers, the slack sagged round her wrist. Dean has interrupted them carving a headstone from a wood burl. He stares at it awhile. No one speaks.

After that, he decides it's best if he stays in, so he does. Food appears at his door sometimes. He eats it when he notices.

It's no surprise when he looks up, later that day or some other day—who gives a shit—and sees Dahl standing there, looking down at him, because of course he's on the floor. For the first time in all the time he's known her, she looks uncertain. Her beads are stained dark with rain, the wood grain distinct on every one.

“I thought a long time about what to say to you,” she says. She folds her legs and settles on the floor like one of Cas's acolytes, and that's not an image he wants to have, _ever._

She says, “Do I tell you you're no better than he is? 'Spect you know that. How about we all need you? Right now, doubt that'd work. You'd as soon see us all dead so you can get on with what you think is your business.”

Dean's too damn sick to shut her up. He tries to turn his head so he can't see her anymore, but he went and passed out next to the wall and that limits his options. He stares at the ceiling.

“And, personally? I'd leave you to it. Who'm I to interfere in your karma? But I got this problem.” Her beads click. “See, I'm the closest thing this whacked-out joint has to a counselor. These are your people, and they're scared. Scared like how you were once or twice. The world won't no great shakes to start with but now it's gone and got a whole lot worse, and nobody's steering the boat.”

Dean grunts. He thinks it's a not-my-problem grunt, but it can just as easily be a sorry-about-that grunt or a so-the-fuck-what grunt: anyway, it tells her he's listening, so she goes on.

“You think you're gonna give up, go yellow, die whispering, but you ain't. No more than that turkey Castiel. Wanna know what he's doin'?”

Grunt. This one's made of pain: Cas's name stings like a whiplash.

“Detoxing. Shaking and sweating. Tryna fix his problem, like how I'm tryna fix mine. So lemme ask you, Dean Winchester: what's your problem? How you fixing it?”

Wind-blown rain slams the walls, rattles the windows. Leaves rip free from the trees like tattered flags snapping.

The floor creaks when she stands. 

“If life's your problem, and you fix it by dying, that's your right,” she says, and her voice is different—less snappy, more serious. “But I wanna remind you that you ain't done what you contracted with _yourself_ to do. You ain't saved nothing yet. So you can look forward to being reborn in the same old mess. Go through all this again, a little different. Better, maybe. Prob'ly worse.”

The scream of the door's stiff hinges is barely audible over the storm as she exits.

III.  
That storm batters Dean like it's got a personal problem, decking him more than once. He spits to clear his mouth of mud—not into the wind, of course; that'd be stupid. The wind, he lets blow clean rain down his throat 'til he chokes on it.

He dismisses Dahl's concern about his immortal soul—all his fillying around in Heaven or Hell's got him pretty much convinced that souls go up for grabs when they're freed, not recycled into new and better learning experiences—but if Cas is doing what she says, well. That's something. From the jump, Cas has been the first to lay down and say die; if he's not doing that, then what the hell _is_ he doing?

Cas's doorway is a rectangle of bronze; he's lit his lanterns and tied his curtain so the wind won't shatter it. As soon as Dean's beneath the shelter of the porch, he ditches his coat, wrings his plaid overshirt, and drops them both in a relatively dry spot; he'll get'm tomorrow. Takes off his boots and socks: same. The old, silky boards are chilly wet against the soles of his feet.

He steps through the curtain of bronze light.

IV.  
Cas looks up as Dean ducks through the doorway, heavy-lidded eyes ringed by bruised circles. He's lost weight; the peaks of his shoulder bones tent his worn undershirt like wire hangers.

His hands shake. Dean, with a hangover in the mail, can relate.

He kneels in front of him. He startles at the click of his bottle as he sets it beside him, because of course he brought one. Ordinarily, this would not be execptional, but right now, it seems obscene. 

“Come to brag?” Cas mutters, cutting his eyes at the bottle. 

“No.” Dean shakes his head. “S'not like that, Cas...”

Cas says, “If you've come for the dinner show, I'm sorry. Not good company just now.” He looks away. He sits cross-legged on the floor, his bony forearms balanced on his bony knees. When did he become so fragile? The lantern-light slicks his sweaty skin. He smells like burned oil.

He grins sidelong at Dean. It's a sick effort, and it makes Dean groan deep inside.

“Make you a deal,” he says. “I give up mine if you give up yours.”

“What are you talking about, Cas?” But Dean knows. He doesn't want to, but he knows.

“Let's take a walk.” Cas struggles to his feet, using the dresser as a prop. He flinches with every motion, but he waves off Dean's silent offer to help.

V.  
“Yesterday,” he says, “I put everything I had left in here.”

He wags the drawstring bag. It's some handmade hippie nightmare, all fuschia and gold embroidery on slithery teal satin. The objects inside distort the paisley pattern.

They stand in the middle of the swamp at the edge of a fast-running stream. Moss-furred roots hump out of stagnant black water all around. Tree limbs bow beneath the weight of vines. 

The storm's blown itself out as they hiked here, but there's occasional run-off from overburdened upper branches. Dean raises his hand reflexively when rainwater runs down his neck.

Cas glances up from where he kneels on the stream's bank. Broken branches and bits of trash from upstream whip by, hastened by the spillover from the storm. 

“I'm scared,” he admits. 

“So am I, Cas,” Dean says. He kneels beside him and puts his hand on the back of Cas's neck. His vertebrae press dry and hard against his palm.

With a little pressure, Dean urges Cas to turn his head, and he kisses him, thrusts his tongue inside. He wants him to know it's going to be okay, this decision; it's the _right_ decision. Cas tastes bitter. 

Dean halts the kiss and gazes at him, his hand still steady on the back of his neck. Cas glows in the dying light: hollowed-out, but beautiful.

Dean asks, “Why didn't you tell me?” Because the thought of Cas throwing himself all over his room, sick like that, and Dean not there....

Cas breaks his grip then, humps his shoulders, and looks away. “I was ashamed,” he says. 

“Don't be,” Dean says. The rushing water in front of him is streaked green and pinkish-yellow, the colors of the sunset filtered through post-storm fog. He rubs his hands over his face, but he wants to touch Cas. “Cas, don't be. I was mad, yeah, but just cos I was scared.”

He feels Cas's eyes on him. He doesn't have to look over to know that even in this nauseous light, they'd still be blue. 

“Scared,” he repeats. “Because if you'd asked me twice—”

With an almost casual gesture, Cas flips his sack of drugs into the rushing water—

“—I'd've followed you down.”

The stream carries Cas's chemical bliss away. 

VI.  
They're on Cas's bed.

Dean has a military cot, a strip of hard canvas strung tight between rails. Cas has a real bed: queen mattress, frame, posts hung with colorful cloth. Took all goddamned day to shlep it from Kansas City and get it set up, but Cas asked for it soon after he really became mortal and discovered sleep. What first horrified the one-time angel soon became his favorite escape. Cas loves sleep, loves dreaming; Dean was happy to organize a crew and a mission strictly to procure him a comfortable bed.

They cuddle on it now, Dean with his face buried in Cas's chest. He's shaking. So is Cas.

Detox is not romantic. They grip each other for comfort as they travel through their private hells. Cas—if he's lucky, if he times it right—gets up to vomit and shit, his body adapting to the absence of opiates. He sweats and moans, his nerves reporting painpainpain, muscles too heavy on his bones, bones stretching his skin, brain too big for his skull, air too sharp in his lungs. He learns for the first time how much living hurts.

And Dean? He twitches and shudders as his nerves adapt to a world without alcohol. He sleeps and wakes to horror: every minute, the world ends. His guilt is enormous. His anxiety fills galaxies.

Cas has kept the useful members of his pharmaceutical arsenal around. He slips benzos and barbiturates between Dean's lips, modulating his come-down so he won't seize. He medicates his own withdrawal, and Dean doesn't police it, though he knows he should. They're going through this together. If Cas betrays him now, he also betrays himself; there's no point in riding him. 

It's a terrible time, but it is also the purest experience of trust. Naked, they hold each other, skins slicked with sick sweat.


	11. Eleventh Measure

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first draft of this chapter was a bolt-out-of-sound-sleep MUST DELETE. Though this revision still deals with problematic subjects, I can stand behind it, unlike the first go-round. Enjoy, and sorry for the wussy "oops."

I.  
After a week, Dean feels solid enough to go to the motor pool and help part out a dead truck. The only thing stopping him is his hen-mother-clucking concern over Cas.

Thing is? Cas thinks it's super peachy Dean can shake and sweat a little and now all he has to worry about are free-floating panic attacks. He's happy for him. Really. But when he lies down on the bed, his spine still rips the mattress. Dean, on his ribs, might as well be an anvil. Not to put too fine a point on it, he hurts, and while he understands he won't hurt forever, that doesn't do him any fucking good in the now.

Dean, pink and whistling, makes him feel worse for not feeling better. So on a nice, bright day, Cas pretty much takes him by the scruff of his neck and throws him out of the cabin.

In the silence left behind him, he tries to paint, but the rough scritch of the bristles against the canvas irritates him. His shoulder hurts from holding up his arm; his fingers hurt from gripping the brush.

He turns from the canvas and stares with unfocused eyes at his jerry-rigged stained glass windows, distracted by the silky feel of the cool autumn air on his skin. With a tiny shiver, he realizes it's the first thing that hasn't hurt him since he beamed back down for good.

So, what the hell. He goes for a walk.

II.  
The swamp is pretty enough if you hike it on a pretty day: moss-hung branches reflected in pools of water, the algae on top smooth and bright as a golf green dappled by sunshine, but Cas doesn't go that way. He's wary of the part of him that's prepared to chop down every goddamn tree and drain every rivulet if it'll help him find his embroidered bag. 

Instead, he walks upill along the road. Once he's past even the suggestion of wetland, he strikes out into the woods, careful to note his landmarks. He can't rely on his grace to get him home if he gets lost. 

His joints feel like they've been lubed by ground glass, and the uphill hike is a sad reminder of the strength he's lost. When he finds a pretty enough meadow, he takes a break, sinking to the ground, folding his legs in his usual meditative posture. Autumn leaves tile the ground around him, a mosaic made of blood and sunsets, but enough remain on the trees that their branches don't depress him with their stark fragility.

Ordinarily, he'd be naming colors and admiring the play of the sun on the textures around him, but as he sits, what strikes him is the purity of the air. It rings in his lungs like the clear tones of bells, clean of car exhaust or conversations smeared to meaninglessness by distance or apathy. Unseen birds furl their wings with whispered rustles; tiny, hidden creatures rush and bustle in the undergrowth, their frail toes snapping frailer twigs. 

The world's returned to the garden God originally intended.

Cas rolls his hand back and forth in a beam, watching the way his skin breaks the light into miniscule prisms. It's the result of the salt of his sweat trapped in the tiny pleats in his junkie hide, but it's still beautiful. It's kind of a relief, after all the hideousness he's visited on himself, that something about him can still be beautiful.

An animal larger than the chipmunks and squirrels he's been half-listening to steps delicately up to him, casts its narrow shadow over his folded legs. He looks up.

The fawn gazes down at him. Her large ears are like long oval leaves, the veins silhouetted by the sun shining through. Her long lashes spike shadows down her nose as she extends it to sniff his palm. Her nose leather is black, and cold, and wet, and it leaves a heart shape on his palm that shines bright before it fades.

Then heavy, clumsy footsteps crash behind him: her head and tail snap up, and she wheels and bounds away.

III.  
“Picked a hell of a place to nap, Cas.”

Cas startles. The clearing is still beautiful. The light still makes tiny stars on his skin. And yet there's no sign of the fawn. 

Dean throws himself down beside him. 

“How'd you find me?” Cas asks. He plucks a wild grain, its gnarled head bristled gold. It throws a shadow like a peacock feather.

“Followed your prints,” Dean says. Of course he did.

“Okay. What for? I thought you were going to spend this afternoon dissecting a car for fun.” He gives Dean a grin so he knows he's not unwelcome. “Sick freak.”

Dean returns the grin, briefly, weakly, before he looks away, troubled. “Came over all panicky,” he says, squinting against the light. “Had to see you, and you weren't at the cabin. Guys said they saw you walking along the road.”

“Obviously I didn't go too far.” Cas catches the hint of displeasure in his own voice. He's had just about enough of Dean's hovering.

Dean responds to the unspoken rebuke, his voice roughening. “You still look like—hell, Cas, I don't even know what you look like. A toss-up between those charity begging pictures from the dusty places and a perfume ad circa nineteen ninety fuck me. You ain't going far in any direction. I'm just glad this's the one you chose.”

There's nothing to say to that.

“I been thinkin.” Dean throws something small he plucked from the ground into the leaves in front of him, stupidly embarrassed as always to admit he sometimes thinks. “You, falling, kicking... s'like, your whole time human's been spent proving bliss sucks ass.”

“But it doesn't,” Cas says. He squints at Dean's profile. He hardly ever gets to see him this way, sitting calmly, bathed in light, and while he wishes he could say Dean looks totally natural and at home, it's not the truth. Dean is not and never will be a creature of the light. The divide between him and the things he hunts has always been narrow; darkness runs all through him like the flaw in a stone. But it's just a flaw, not a spreading stain; it doesn't corrupt him. 

Dean shoots him a sidelong, quizzical glance, waiting for him to finish his thought. 

“Bliss is the ultimate happiness,” he says with deliberation, thinking it through even as he speaks. “Happiness has a price, so bliss has the highest price. I could've kept on with Heaven; it would have just cost me you.” He looks over at Dean to make sure he hears that. Fuck the world. “And I could've kept on with heroin. Again, it would have just cost me you.” 

He clears his throat. “I won't lose you,” he says at last. “You can't make me. God can't make me. Nothing can make me.” 

Dean seizes Cas into a kiss, rough and desperate, driving tongue, hard hands. Cas meets his intensity, tries to channel blood and sunsets, the fawn, the sparkles off his skin, light and color, through his kiss and into him. 

Because he knows what's behind Dean's force; he remembers, and he knows Dean remembers. And in the peace of this day, there's a lesson Dean needs to learn...

IV.  
What started off as comfort decayed like everything else here, at the end of the world.

It was a slow decay, and for awhile, it was barely noticeable. Cas got used to the taste of whiskey in Dean's mouth. Dean ignored Cas's drum circle orgies. They held each other gently, nibbled kisses in the night, each aware of the other's wounds.

But time passed, and as Cas's grace faded, he began his slow suicide. He told lies: the drugs were to aid his search for God, or to sharpen him up for combat, or to help him remember and mourn Heaven... but the cold truth was, the drugs just helped him more than Dean's tenderness did. As his power faded, his anxiety grew; as feelings and emotions swamped and bewildered him, drugs offered immediate surcease. He fooled himself he could control his dosage in a way he could not control Dean, and that made him feel... something. Safe, maybe. Less anxious, for sure. 

Maybe Dean grew harder because, on some level, he felt like he'd failed him. In any event, he ran more missions, recruited and coldly drilled his men, and made the tough calls, as he always had. He became flinty; he became pragmatic. He sneered at Cas's decadence, but he didn't try to stop it. An unspoken agreement was born: so long as Cas continued to function well as a soldier, he could do as he pleased. 

_Freedom is a length of rope. God wants you to hang yourself with it._

One night Cas screwed the pooch, took something new and was flying too high, when the time came, to go on the mission. Dean was furious, but he had no choice, so he left him behind.

In Cas's memory it's a smash-cut, Dean leaving then exploding through the first of his doomed bead curtains, shirt gone, blood trickling through the sloppy field dressing on his right pec.

Cas had used sex to see him through the embers of his battle rage before, and tonight would have no doubt been more of the same, except he was still flying and couldn't have gotten a stiff neck on a bed of nails. Besides, he wasn't in the mood to listen to Dean scream and fight in his sleep all damn night; he felt too good. He turned his face away and drawled for him to go sleep it off.

“You useless fucking angel!” Dean roared.

“For the time being... yeah,” he shrugged, laughing. 

And that was when Dean lunged at him. He threw him around the room. He snarled curses and rained down punches. It was the intensity that frightened Cas; Dean was out of control, and Cas was mortal now. His grace was too weak. This could not go on.

Dean would be the last thing he'd ever see.

Cas had been putting up some vague resistance, way too stoned to be effective, but at least reminding Dean he was in the fight; at that thought, however, he dropped everything.  
And Dean wrestled him down onto his stomach for the first time.

Cas would hear about the truckload of wounded, the two infected men summarily executed in the field, the next day. That night, the only thing he learned was, the rules had changed.

V.  
Cas wins the short battle: Dean breaks the kiss that's now gone gentle and soft, his hand cupping the back of Cas's head. 

“You can't forgive me,” he rasps.

“I just did,” Cas says.

He screws shut his eyes, drops his head. His voice hisses with pain. “I don't deserve it.”

Cas shrugs. “That's why they call it grace.”

“Then grace is some numb fucking balls!” Dean rips away, jumps to his feet. “I could've killed you that night!”

Cas sighs. This, again. He doesn't bother denying it, but he does roll his eyes.

“God damn it, Cas,” he snarls. “After all this, you still want me to do it. Kill you.”

The color green can be warm or cold or neutral. Dean's eyes stab at Cas, his posture as full of icy menace as a glacier, all still, looming threat. His glare might as well be the reflection of the cold ocean.

And it has no effect. Cas almost laughs. The expression that once froze him throat to balls is just... nothing to him now. It's like the expression is so wrong, so misapplied, it doesn't even exist. 

All he can do is grin as he squints up at Dean, who reads it as a mockery and turns his back with a silent snarl of pain. The sharp black shadows of the leaves flow seamlessly into his.

Cas sighs and pinches off the head of grain, tosses it into the hot drift of leaves in front of him. In the mythology of the world as told by Dean, Dean's always the demon, the most corrupt and corrosive creature. To be sure, the memory they're discussing now was not Dean's finest moment, but it wasn't Cas's either. If he can forgive himself, and forgive Dean, then Dean can damn sure find his way clear to forgiving himself. 

Just like, he suddenly realizes, if he can wrap his head around Dean loving him—that he's something worthy of being loved—then maybe Dean can learn to believe that Cas loves him,whether he deserves it or not. 

Cas takes a deep breath and contemplates the spot where the head of grain disappeared in the bright fallen leaves, their colors like smooth curves of flame. A weak acid flashback, like a shiver in his brain, sends him back to the bonfire, watching the bright shapes flow as the logs were consumed and Dean sat beside him, talking about whether he deserved to be called an angel or not.

There's nothing to pray to anymore, but Cas prays anyway. There's something he understands; he prays to the bright colors and the pure air and the fawn who had kissed his palm for the words to express it. 

“Dean,” he says haltingly, and Dean twitches at the sound of his name, turning to him infintesimally; Cas has not hesitated like this in a long while, not since cocaine taught him glibness. “When my grace ebbed, I sought death, and yeah, I figured if I screwed around enough, screamed my infantile angst loud enough, you'd do it someday. Dean, look at me. You always give people what they want.”

He peers up to make sure Dean hears this, closing one eye against the sun's glare, the other squinting hard.

He continues, gently pressing each word into him: “That's how you take care of the people you love.”

That knocks the wind from him. He's shattered. He all but falls down in front of Cas, one tear already slipping from one green eye, so slowly Cas expects to see the color run out with it, leeching the iris gray. His mouth wobbles loose.

Cas smiles softly and deals the final blow. “So how can I hold that against you? It's the good in you. That's your grace.”

“Enough talking,” Dean husks.


End file.
